Vicki and Graham. Handing over the keys. Photo by Paul Goldfinger
By Mary Walton
Two years ago Graham Carter wanted to open a toy store in Ocean Grove. His wife Sandi urged him on. But real estate agents told him properties rarely became available here. He turned to Sandi. “What’s wrong with Asbury Park?”
As it turned out, everything.
Even on a high profile corner like Cookman and Mattison, “The Store by the Shore” suffered. “Not enough people, didn’t get foot traffic, too far from the boardwalk.”
Then, just after Christmas, Vicki LaBella, owner of News & Such and the building that houses it on Main Avenue in Ocean Grove, closed her business and announced that the space was for rent. Last Friday, Carter signed a three-year lease. “It was just too good an opportunity to miss,” he told Blogfinger. “Great location, great landlady, what more could you want?”
For Carter, 53, selling toys follows a financial career in his native Britain, where he was the head of an international section of a London stock brokerage. He met his wife, an American, in business, and moved to the United States six years ago because “She did not like England.” As it turned out, he added, “She didn’t like me much either.” The couple separated six months ago.
Meanwhile he had begun to deal in antique toys and Victorian glass over the Internet. A retail business seemed like a natural progression, or at least not an unnatural one.
Carter said he will keep the name “Store by the Shore” and hopes to open in Ocean Grove by March 1 after minor renovations. “A lick of paint here and there. And the floor has to be level. You can’t have an uneven floor. You can’t have people falling over, especially little children.” As in Asbury, he will stock his store with quality toys. “I have this thing about selling cheap plastic crap from Hong Kong. I have three children. I know how frustrating it is when you buy something and it falls apart after two minutes.” He will not sell electronic games or toy guns. But he will include some items to interest grown-ups while the children are playing with merchandise.
While LaBella’s store was for sale, “I had a lot of people look,” she said. “Someone wanted to take the space just to hold onto it. There was a deli, but it wasn’t firm.” Also a barber shop, and a store that wanted to sell imports from France.
But Carter was in the right place at the right time. LaBella believes a toy store will be a “delightful addition” to the retail mix on Main Avenue, and Carter, she said, “is a pleasure to deal with.”
Not all Main Avenue business people are as thrilled as LaBella. Comfort Zone’s Steve Mandeville said he was distressed when he and his partner, Victor Aluise, owner of The Emporium, stopped in the Store by the Shore in Asbury one day and discovered that both his shop and Carter’s carried a line of toys made by a company called Melissa and Doug, and that Carter would also be selling it in Ocean Grove. He and Carter had words. Carter, he said, “didn’t care that we would be selling the same merchandise.” Mandeville added, “If everybody carries the same merchandise, nobody’s going to want to come to town.” What transpired in the conversation is disputed, but Carter characterized the encounter as “not very pleasant.”
Richard Lapore, owner of Smuggler’s Cover, spoke to Carter as well, telling him, he said, that “having been in the retail business 33 years, I do not see the point” of launching such a store, giving that “there are not a lot of kids in Ocean Grove.”
Now that it’s a done deal, Lapore said he wishes Carter well. “A vacant store on Main Avenue, that’s worse than anything.”-
AND: From the operetta “Babes in Toyland” by Victor Herbert, here is Leon Redbone’s version of “Toyland.”