Walk down Harvard Street on a Thursday afternoon this month and the neighborhood looks like it always does. The market fills the Centre Street West lot behind the Coolidge Corner Theatre the way it has for more than four decades, Kimball Fruit Farm and Mei Mei Dumplings and Clear Flour Bread and Solstice Pasta & Provisions set up in roughly the same spots they've held for years. Cross Beacon Street, though, and the storefronts tell a different story than the market does. One block has a going-out-of-business sign. Another has fresh permit paperwork taped to the glass. A third has a line out the door for a coffee shop that didn't exist six months ago.
The easy read on all of this is a headline: small businesses are struggling. It's the kind of thing that gets said at dinner parties and in Town Meeting hallways, and it isn't wrong so much as it's incomplete. Look at the actual businesses leaving Coolidge Corner and Brookline Village this year, and the ones arriving to take their place, and a sharper pattern shows up. The people closing are almost always running a single shop on years of earned goodwill. The people opening are backed by chains, franchises, or investors who already have locations somewhere else. That difference, not some vague sense of decline, is what's actually reshaping this stretch of street.
Two closures, two very different reasons
curds&co, the cheese shop that's spent years running tastings and wine pairings out of Brookline Village, is closing for good on September 12. The owners had quietly been trying to sell the business since 2023 and never found a buyer. That's a specific, almost mundane ending. It's not about foot traffic or rent spikes so much as a business that ran its course without a succession plan.
A few blocks away, on the same stretch of Beacon and Harvard, When Pigs Fly is shutting its Brookline location after more than twenty years. The bakery is also closing its Jamaica Plain shop at the same time, because the company couldn't renew both leases at once. Two closures, same corridor, same general timing, and two completely unrelated causes. One is a business that ran out of runway. The other is a company making a real estate trade-off between two locations it couldn't hold onto simultaneously.
Lumping these into a single narrative flattens what's actually happening. Neither closure is really about whether Coolidge Corner can support a small business. Both are about the specific pressures on that particular business.
What's replacing them
Across the street from the Coolidge Corner Theatre, PLNT Burger has already opened, a national vegan fast-casual chain moving into a spot that used to belong to somebody with one location and one name on the lease. A few doors down, Marky's Caviar, a Florida-based chain with locations already running in New York and Florida, has filed plans for a retail counter and champagne cafe at 420 Harvard Street, right next to Tatte.
The bigger shift landed at 392 Harvard, next door to Congregation Kehillath Israel. Wonder, the food hall and delivery concept backed by the same company that owns Grubhub and Blue Apron, opened this August in a roughly 3,500-square-foot space plus basement just north of Coolidge Corner. It isn't a restaurant in the traditional sense. Wonder combines chef-driven menus with a delivery and takeout model, and much of the cooking happens off-site at a commissary kitchen before being finished in the space customers actually walk into. Whether that model changes how people in Coolidge Corner think about a quick dinner, the way it has in other Massachusetts towns where Wonder has landed this year, is still an open question. What isn't in question is the size of the capital behind it, which is a different order of investment than the shop it's replacing.
Not every new arrival fits that mold, and that's worth sitting with too. Arwa, a Yemeni coffee shop that's opened nearby, has built its menu around Mofawer, a cardamom-spiked coffee brewed in a kettle, and Jubani, coffee brewed with warm spices and husks, alongside pistachio lattes. The room leans on arches, mosaics, and wicker light fixtures drawn from Yemeni design traditions. It's an independent concept, not a chain, and it fills a real gap: a late-hours coffee shop in a district that's mostly rotated between the same two or three options for years. If you've been walking home at ten at night with nowhere to sit that isn't a bar, Arwa changes that.
The mix, not the count, is what matters
David Leschinsky, who has owned Eureka! Puzzles & Games in Coolidge Corner long enough to have lived through several rounds of this exact conversation, made a point in a recent conversation with Brookline.News that cuts against the panic narrative. His concern isn't any single storefront going dark. It's the overall mix of businesses on the block, because neighboring shops influence each other's foot traffic and each other's success. A cheese shop closing next to a bakery closing next to a puzzle store that's stayed put isn't one story. It's three, and only one of the three involves an empty storefront waiting to be filled.
That's the piece that gets lost when these closures get discussed as a single wave. The businesses leaving are single-location and owner-operated, running on accumulated goodwill rather than fresh capital. The businesses arriving are backed by chains, franchises, or investors who already have multiple locations open elsewhere. That's not a verdict on either kind of business. It's simply a description of who can currently afford the storefronts on Beacon and Harvard, and it explains why the same six blocks can feel like they're shrinking and expanding at the same time depending on which direction you're looking.
Not every storefront in motion is closing or opening for a straightforward reason, either. Painted Burro, the Mexican restaurant in Washington Square, and Vinodivino, the wine shop next door, were both still dark as of early June, months after a January fire in the building's basement forced them to shut down. Their closure isn't about demand or a landlord raising rent. It's an insurance dispute and delayed electrical repairs, the kind of unglamorous, drawn-out problem that has nothing to do with whether people still want to eat there.
What hasn't moved
Against all of this, the Brookline Farmers Market is the fixed point. It's 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 four decades, and this year's season runs from June 4 through November 19. The same names show up week after week: Kimball Fruit Farm, Mei Mei Dumplings, Clear Flour Bread, Solstice Pasta & Provisions. None of it depends on whoever signs the next lease down the block, and if you want a low-stakes way to see the neighborhood without wondering whether a storefront will still be there next year, Thursday afternoon at the market is still it.
One more thing worth planning around
If you're walking to the market or running errands along Beacon Street this fall, budget extra time. The MBTA's Green Line C-branch accessibility project, aimed at making seven above-ground stations along Beacon Street fully accessible for the first time since most of them were built before the Americans with Disabilities Act existed, has already run two of three planned week-long shutdowns this year, one in May and another from August 8 through August 16. The project is targeting substantial completion by spring 2027, and additional shorter diversions are likely between now and then. When the C branch is down, shuttle buses replace the trolleys on Beacon Street, which means a walk to the market or a stop at any of the storefronts above may take longer than you're used to. It's a short-term inconvenience attached to a long-term fix, and knowing it's coming beats being surprised by it on a Thursday afternoon.
None of this adds up to a single verdict on Coolidge Corner. It's not thriving and it's not struggling. It's a district where the cost of holding a storefront has moved further away from what one owner running one shop can sustain, at almost the exact moment several well-capitalized concepts decided this stretch of Harvard and Beacon was worth the price of getting in. That's a real shift, and it's one you can watch happen block by block if you know what you're looking at.
If you're curious how any of this touches property values or timing around a move in Brookline, Sheri Flagler has spent more than two decades watching this exact corridor change. Let's Connect.
