It was a good run for the health food and vitamin shop Second Nature — almost 52 years in East Hampton — but on Sunday the shop closed its doors in East Hampton.
Paul Leavitt and Terrence Nelson first opened Second Nature on Newtown Lane in 1972 and a month or so later opened a shop on Main Street in Southampton. In 1994, Lisa and Cliff Blinderman bought the two shops and kept them both running until deciding earlier this year to close the East Hampton location, which had been operating out of a tiny storefront on Park Place since 2017.
Ms. Blinderman said they made the decision not because of the rent — “Rents out here have always been high” — but because the foot traffic has all but disappeared. “Southampton is livelier,” she said.
After the lease on their Newtown Lane store had been fulfilled, the Blindermans rented a long skinny space on the Reutershan parking lot that had once been a garage. They had to put in the flooring, heating, lighting, and mahogany shelving, all at considerable expense.
Even though the internet started hurting brick-and-mortar stores years ago, the couple said, it is the big-name international stores moving into the village — and being open only in the summer — that has had a bigger impact on foot traffic. By Ms. Blinderman’s count, there are fewer than a dozen stores in East Hampton that cater to the year-round population.
“The village should have put a limit on how many stores a chain would be allowed to have,” she said.
Things felt different in the shop’s earlier years, where her mother, Adrienne Carris, could often be found at the counter. “My mother loved the East Hampton store,” Ms. Blinderman said. “She worked and helped us for a few decades. As she got older and couldn’t any longer she still wanted to know what was going on in the village and our store. . . . Truthfully, the customers adored her probably more than me.” Ms. Carris died last year at 91.
“We always did well enough to support the rent: We were a specialty store. Supermarkets didn’t sell organic milk or organic honey back then,” she said.
The Southampton Second Nature has retained more of a walk-in customer base. The shop also sells refrigerated and frozen food in addition to juices and smoothies and the requisite vitamins.
