Detroit Hardware, open along Woodward Avenue in New Center since the early 1930s, has sold its building and plans to close in June.

Co-owner Emily Webster, 70, said she and her two partners are "retirement age" and received an offer on the building that was "more than we had ever dreamed of getting" — $1,050,000.

The sale closed last week. Webster declined to disclose the buyer's name.

She and co-owners Robert Hocking and Anna Sparkman aim to sell the Detroit Hardware name and intellectual rights, too.

The hardware retailer has one full-time employee — Vickie Nezwisky, who has been there more than 40 years — and three part-time.

One is Webster's daughter. Her family has been with the company since Emily Webster's father, Albert Green, started there in 1926. He bought the business with Jack Hocking in the 1950s.

It originally began in 1924 around the corner from its current, longtime home at 6432 Woodward Ave. The building is two stories in the front and one in the back, with approximately 5,500 square feet. It sits on the same block as The Platform LLC's Baltimore Station project and a block southeast of East Grand Boulevard. It's at the edge of a block home to several Midtown Detroit Inc. buildings and redevelopments.

The hardware company was leasing until the early 1990s, when it bought the Woodward building for around $94,000, Webster said. Not having to pay rent is a big reason they've remained open so many years.

"We felt we have been operating as kind of a community service," she said. "And we loved it ... We feel like we're doing a great thing there. But there just comes a time where you can't do it anymore."

They weren't forced to close by lack of business, she said. It's "better than it has been in years," largely due to young people moving downtown, buy-local trends and so many home renovation projects nearby — as well as construction workers in need of equipment just outside their doors when the QLine streetcar system was being built.

But after 94-year-old Detroit Hardware winds down with sales and then closes June 16, the area will need a replacement, she said.

The shop is among a dwindling number of hardware stores in the city. Three on the city's east side closed last year, Crain's previously reported. Also in 2017, the owners of Busy Bee Hardware sold their building at Gratiot and Russell and closed a century-old mainstay on the edge of downtown and Eastern Market. Some still in business include Triangle Hardware on the east side, Third Ave. Hardware Inc. in Midtown and Brooks Lumber in Corktown.