In the same six weeks this summer, Brookline lost a cheese shop that had been slicing wedges behind Coolidge Corner Theatre for 13 years and gained a caviar bar from Florida a few blocks away. Ask a longtime resident whether the neighborhood is struggling or booming right now and you'll get both answers, sometimes in the same sentence. The honest read is that they're not describing two different things. They're describing one thing from two ends.
curds&co, the Brookline Village cheese shop known for its tastings and wine pairings, is closing for good on September 12. The owners had been quietly trying to sell the business since 2023 and couldn't find a buyer. Around the same stretch of Beacon and Harvard Streets, a bakery called When Pigs Fly is shutting its Brookline location after more than 20 years, and its Jamaica Plain shop too, because the company couldn't renew both leases at once. Meanwhile Marky's Caviar, a Florida-based chain with locations in New York and Florida, has filed plans to open a retail counter and champagne cafe at 420 Harvard Street, right next to Tatte. PLNT Burger, a national vegan fast-casual chain, has already opened across from the Coolidge Corner Theatre. A Wonder Group food hall, the same fast-fine concept backing the Grubhub founder's newest venture, is preparing a roughly 3,500-square-foot space plus basement just north of Coolidge Corner on Harvard.
That is not a coincidence of timing. It's a pattern in the commercial real estate math, and if you've walked down Beacon Street lately and felt like the neighborhood was somehow shrinking and expanding at once, you were reading it correctly.
What the shop owners themselves are saying
Brookline.News sat down with several longtime business owners after the recent run of closures, and the most useful voice in the piece belongs to David Leschinsky, who owns Eureka! Puzzles & Games in Coolidge Corner. Leschinsky isn't worried about any single closure. He's watched Coolidge Corner cycle through entire categories of business before, frozen yogurt shops giving way to ice cream parlors, then nail salons, then barber shops, each wave rushing in because the last concept looked successful, only to discover the neighborhood couldn't support that many similar storefronts at once. His read on why a shop like his survives is that they thrive when there is a supporting ecosystem with lots of other businesses that people want to go to. A destination business needs neighbors, not just customers.
Tom Coppi, who has owned The Picture Place since 2015, offered a more personal version of the same math. His framing shop has been stable through the pandemic and after, but he was candid that he doubts he could afford to open the same business today if he weren't already established. Rent has moved further from what a small, single-owner shop can carry, in a way it hadn't when he got started.
Put Leschinsky and Coppi's read next to the specific businesses closing and opening, and the pattern gets sharper. The businesses leaving Coolidge Corner and Brookline Village are single-location, owner-operated, and running on years of accumulated goodwill rather than fresh capital. The businesses arriving are backed by chains, franchises, or investors with multiple locations already open elsewhere. That's not a value judgment about either kind of business. It's a description of who can currently afford the storefronts on this stretch of Beacon and Harvard.
The scoreboard, if you want one
Here's what's changed hands or is about to, drawn from local reporting over the past several months:
| Closing or closed | Opening or announced |
|---|---|
| curds&co, cheese shop, Brookline Village (closes Sept. 12) | Marky's Caviar, 420 Harvard St., next to Tatte |
| When Pigs Fly Breads, Brookline and JP locations | PLNT Burger, across from Coolidge Corner Theatre |
| Bess's Cafe | Wonder Group food hall, Harvard St. north of Coolidge Corner |
| — | Barcelona Wine Bar expanding into the former Ivory Pearl space at 1704 Beacon St. |
Nobody interviewed for the Brookline.News piece thinks these closures are connected to each other in the sense of one cause. Greg Reibman, who now leads the Charles River Regional Chamber after it absorbed the former Brookline Chamber of Commerce this spring, made the point directly: every one of these businesses has its own story. That's true, and it's also beside the point a resident actually cares about. You don't need the closures to share a cause to notice that the storefronts filling back in share a profile. Coolidge Corner isn't emptying out. It's re-sorting toward whoever can currently carry the rent, and right now that tends to mean a company with more than one location already, not a founder signing their first lease.
What's steady while the storefronts turn over
Not everything on this stretch is in motion. The Brookline Farmers Market has run every Thursday from 1:30 to 6:30 p.m. in the Centre Street West Parking Lot behind the Coolidge Corner Theatre for more than 43 years, and the 2026 season is in full swing through November 19. It's the one weekly fixture that hasn't moved, hasn't rebranded, and doesn't depend on whoever signs the next lease down the block. Regulars this season include Kimball Fruit Farm, Mei Mei Dumplings, Clear Flour Bread, and Solstice Pasta & Provisions, the same names you'd have found there a few summers ago. If you want a low-stakes way to see the neighborhood without wondering whether a storefront will still be there in a year, Thursday afternoon at the market is it.
The other thing worth knowing this week has nothing to do with retail and everything to do with getting around. The MBTA's Green Line C-branch accessibility project, which has spent the past several months rebuilding station platforms along Beacon Street, opened new platforms at the Englewood and Tappan stops in July and restored the median angle parking alongside them. According to the Town of Brookline's own construction updates, the project's contractor, Jacobs-Barletta, is running a full week-long shutdown and shuttle diversion on the C branch from Saturday, August 8 through Sunday, August 16, the second of three planned closures on the way to a targeted spring 2027 finish. If you're planning a walk to the farmers market or a stop at any of the storefronts above this week, expect shuttle buses in place of trolleys and build in a few extra minutes.
Reading the street instead of the headline
The easy version of this story is "small businesses are struggling." The Brookline.News reporting doesn't actually support that as a single, tidy explanation, and neither Leschinsky nor Coppi framed it that way. What both of them described, in their own words, is a neighborhood where the cost of holding a storefront has moved further away from what a single owner running one shop can sustain, at the same moment several well-capitalized concepts decided Coolidge Corner was worth the entry price. Those are the same six weeks. They're the same mechanism, arriving from opposite directions.
If you live here, the practical version of that insight is simple. The businesses you've relied on for years aren't disappearing because nobody wants to shop local anymore. They're disappearing because the lease math changed under them, and the businesses replacing them are the kind built to absorb that math. Worth knowing next time you're deciding where to spend a Thursday afternoon, and worth watching over the next year to see whether the pattern holds.
If you're curious what any of this looks like translated into property values or timing on your own street, The Boston Home Team tracks Brookline block by block, not just the headlines. Request a free neighborhood market analysis whenever you're ready to see what your own corner of town looks like on paper.
