UPPER EAST SIDE, NY — The Gracious Home location on Third Avenue is looking for more grace and more space.
That’s good news for shoppers, who contacted Patch after noticing ominous “For Rent” signs hanging above the longtime housewares store, who feared that the iconic Manhattan shop was set to be the next neighborhood favorite to bite the dust.
According to a worker at the store, which has been at that location since the late Natan Wekselbaum first opened the business in 1963, Gracious Home is merely relocating for more space.
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The employee had no details regarding a new location, timing or a moving sale, but signs for a lingering holiday clearance opportunity remained in the window.
For Gracious Home, the news is at least partially ironic — at one time, the store took up the entire Third Avenue frontage, from East 70th to 71st streets, and spanned over 40,000-square-feet.
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Founder Wekselbaum, a Jewish man born in Cuba, started with just a 2,000-square-foot hardware store to start, according to his New York Times obituary.
Along with his brother, David, Wekselbaum grew the shop into a destination for discerning shoppers looking for quality — and sometimes rare — items.
At one point, the stores employed 500 workers. When Wekselbaum needed a kidney transplant in 2003, nearly 20 people offered him theirs, the Times wrote. The winning donor was a salesmen from the hardware department.
With several other additional stores in Manhattan, the business faltered from overexpansion and the family sold the business and retired in 2010.
When the Third Avenue location downsized in 2016 — and the Upper West Side and two other locations closed altogether — the closeout sale was such an event that local news sites were still writing articles about it three weeks later.
In 2018, the new Gracious Home owners were looking into expanding once again after declaring bankruptcy with a new store in Soho, but according to their website, their only other location is in Tennessee.
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