NASHUA – The Christmas season will be a little less festive at Tanorama and other businesses in the Central Realty Plaza on Amherst Street, which have been told they must vacate by the end of January so that the building can be torn down.

“We can’t afford to move. We’re going to stay open to the end of December, and then close,” said Darrel Barlow, who co-owns the Tanorama with his son, Tim. “We sent about 200 letters out to our clients, letting them know.”

“All the clients are coming in, saying what am I going to do? I’ve been tanning here since 1980-whatever,” said Sheila Johnson, who has worked at the tanning studio for seven years. “I’ve been tanning here since my son was a baby – he’s 12 now.”

The 18,000-square-foot plaza at 337 Amherst St., which is 29 years old, is being sold to an unnamed buyer who wants to tear it down, said Dick Anagnost of Anagnost Cos. in Manchester, whose AV3 Properties owns the plaza.

Anagnost declined to name the buyer or future plans for the roughly 2-acre site, in front of the Cannongate condominiums. No plans have been filed with the city for the property.

Other businesses in the plaza include Chen Yang Li restaurant, the Turquoise Shop and Creative Cutters.

“I’m staying open. I’m moving,” said Catherine Edmonds, owner of the Turquoise Shop, which has been in the plaza since it opened and has been in business 39 years.

Creative Cutters, which has four hairdressing chairs and a nail technician, also will move, said owner Ralene Clark.

The difficulty is that Christmas is the busiest and most lucrative time of year, which leaves little time to find a new space, particularly when it has specialty plumbing needs like a hair salon.

“It’s panic – there is no way that I can move my business in a 30-day span,” she said. “Am I busy? Very! Don’t you want your hair cut to look nice for your Christmas picture?”

A person who answered the phone at Chen Yang Li declined to comment, but Barlow said he had heard that the restaurant, which has branches in Bedford and Bow, will move.

The building was foreclosed on a year or so ago by Digital Federal Credit Union. AV3 Properties bought it in June.

Anagnost said the original plan was to refurbish the building, which is more than half empty at the moment, and continue to lease it as a retail space, but a prospective tenant decided to buy it instead.

He noted that tenants were told after the foreclosure went through that their leases had ended and they were operating on monthly status.

Last week, the businesses all received termination-of-lease letters, saying they had to be out by Jan. 15, but Anagnost said the schedule is more flexible and the actual deadline is Feb. 1.

“Even if we had kept the property, the tenants would have had to shift or change so we could rehab the structure,” he said.

As for Johnson, a single mother who also works as a hairdresser, she said she wouldn’t let the bad news spoil Christmas.

“I’m going to enjoy my son’s holiday vacation with him and then start looking for another job,” she said. “But it stinks, a well-known business like this closing.”

David Brooks can be reached at 594-6531 or dbrooks@nashua
telegraph.com. Also, follow Brooks’ blog on Twitter
(@GraniteGeek).

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