Relocation

Boomerangs flung across town

by Nina Willdorf

Boomerangs, a store catering to thrift-store shoppers with style and a social conscience, moved in mid July from Canal Street in the Bulfinch Triangle to Jamaica Plain. Though news of the move is now vintage, the reason the shop packed up its Prada and picture frames to move to JP hasn't been confirmed until now. In short, Boomerangs became yet another casualty of Boston's real-estate boom.

After rent and salaries, any money Boomerangs pulls in goes straight to the AIDS Action Committee, New England's largest AIDS-service agency. The money is distributed among the organization's outreach projects, which include nutrition, drug-counseling, and housing programs; in total, these services help more than 2200 AIDS patients. But for the past year, that surplus amounted to pretty much nothing. "The operating costs went up in the past year to the point where any of the profit that we had was being swallowed up by rent," says Richard J. Downey, Boomerangs' manager. "We were making a killing [on Canal Street]," he says, "but it just so happens the landlord was too."

When Boomerangs opened in 1996, it was only the third tenant to occupy the building in 125 years. But when the rent went up $5000 in 1999, Downey recognized that the neighborhood was no longer "realistic" for the do-gooder store.

If nothing else, the move shows how downtown is booming. Bill Colby, president of Andrew Dutton Company, which owns the Canal Street building, said that many dot-coms jumped at the chance to occupy the space. "Five years ago, the rents were in the high teens or low 20s [per square foot]," Colby estimates, "today it's mid 30s." The neighborhood, he says, is becoming attractive to dot-coms and prohibitively expensive for stores like Boomerangs.

But Boomerangs' employees say that JP's more their style anyway. With added foot traffic and nighttime hours, Boomerangs is poised to bounce back, says Carissa Cunningham, a spokeswoman for AIDS Action.

Amy Garbo, a JP resident, agrees. "They were right on with the target market," she says. "People in the Financial District may be more fashion-conscious, but people in JP are more socially conscious."