HOLLYWOOD — The bins of loose screws near the register are being sold by the pound now, which is one way to learn how many odd little parts a neighborhood hardware store keeps on hand for the one customer a year who needs each of them.
The store, a fixture on its stretch of the boulevard for forty-six years, is closing this spring. Its owners are retiring, the building’s rent is climbing toward numbers a hardware store cannot make on washers and wall anchors, and the couple who have run the place since the late 1970s decided, as one of them put it, to leave a little ahead of being pushed.
“People think a hardware store sells hardware. What we sell is the ten minutes where I tell you which of these four things you actually need and talk you out of the other three,” said Efrén Casaus, who owns the store with his wife, Lucia. “You can’t buy that online. But apparently you can raise the rent until the man who gives it away for free has to leave.”
For decades the store filled the role such places fill: the emergency stop for a leaking valve at eight on a Sunday, the counter where a first-time homeowner could describe a broken thing badly and still walk out with the right fix. Regulars came for the advice as much as the parts, and Casaus, who seems to hold the layout of the store in his head down to the drawer, could produce a discontinued fitting from a back shelf as though he had been keeping it for exactly this visit.
The closing lands amid a stretch of hard years on the boulevard, where storefront vacancy has climbed toward a quarter of the ground-floor spaces and long-lease tenants have given way to pop-ups and papered windows. A hardware store is a particular kind of loss. It does not draw tourists or trend online. It simply sits there being useful for years, until the day it is gone and the neighborhood discovers how far it now has to drive for a can of the right paint.
Longtime employees are scattering to other work. A clerk named Odalys Prentiss, who has worked the floor for nineteen years and knows the regulars by their projects rather than their names, said customers had been coming in less to buy than to say goodbye, some of them visibly thrown to find the shelves half-empty. “A man got upset yesterday about a store that sells nuts and bolts,” she said. “But he wasn’t upset about the bolts.”
The Casauses plan to sell the fixtures, settle with the landlord and take, for the first time in decades, a summer with nowhere to be. On the last full weekend the aisles were busier than they had been in years, thinned of stock but thick with people, many of whom bought something small they did not need, the way you pick up a stone from a place you know you are not coming back to.