After buying the red brick building with the old-fashioned plate glass corner windows at 953 East Fulton, Baribeau & Sons, The Jewelry Hospital, moved in—just 50 yards from the storefront they’ve occupied since 1977.
“I wasn’t necessarily looking at moving this close to our old store,” said owner Steve Baribeau. Baribeau is the third generation of jewelers in his family, following in the footsteps of his grandfather and great uncles who worked at Terryberry in the ‘30s and ‘40s, and later, his father, Larry, who founded their first store on Monroe Avenue in 1963.
“It kept coming back to ‘this is the place,’" Baribeau said. "The building wasn’t even for sale at the time, but I went in and talked to the owner and she ended up selling it. We wanted the retail walk-by customers and the building we were in just didn’t get that. What better place to go than next to Van’s Pastry? We get real nice foot traffic from them and it’s works out real well.”
The new space allows the shop to add a 1,100-squre-foot showroom, complete with 12-foot ceilings that have the original tin decorative ceiling plate.
“We were looking at expanding into retail sales, as well as continuing the jewelry repair work,” Baribeau added. “A lot of the jewelry is estate jewelry, things we’ve bought up over the years and have fixed up. We’ve been collecting them for years and we’ve just never done anything with them, and now we’re finally just saying lets open for retail and sell this stuff.”
The repair benches the jewelry hospital is known for are still a mainstay of the business, which specializes in walk-in repairs for customers and while-you-wait ring sizing.
“We do everything, from the old dump-the-jewelry-box costume jewelry repair to fabricating new jewelry,” Baribeau said. “We do a great deal of new jewelry from groups of jewelry. We say if you can draw it up we can make it, so people are walking around with a lot of unique jewelry that can’t be found anywhere else.”
In addition to the new showroom, the building has two 1-bedroom apartments upstairs—one with 700-square-feet of space, the other with just under 500-square-feet. Baribeau renovated the apartments with hardwood floors and new appliances. A beauty salon, Hair by Lisa, occupies the storefront in the back of the building that faces Holland Avenue NE.
“This is a great neighborhood to be attached to,” Baribeau said. “It’s nice to see people walking up and down the sidewalk, antique shopping, jewelry shopping, and picking up donuts. There’s not many places in town where you can just park your car and go shopping.”
Source: Steve Baribeau, Baribeau & Sons, The Jewelry Hospital www.makemyjewelrynew.com
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