For the first time in at least 20 years, downtown Burlington has a real live hardware store, called, appropriately enough, City Hardware, part of the Ace Hardware family.

Gordon Winters, who also owns Ace Hardware stores in Swanton, St. Albans, Milton, Jericho and Champlain, New York, gave the Burlington Free Press a tour of the new store on College Street, near Burton Snowboards.

Winters said the new store is in line with Ace Hardware's push to locate stores in urban centers instead of on the outskirts of town. He said Ace has to approve every store location, even though he owns his stores independently. Ace is a buyer's cooperative rather than a franchise.

"They're not used to Vermont having an urban market, with a street closed off and 20,000 people within a mile," Winters said of Ace. "Once they got here and got their eyes on it, they liked it."

Meeting daily needs

Winters is counting on people living and working in downtown Burlington and the surrounding neighborhoods, as well as electrical contractors and other trades working in the area, to be his customers.

"We don't think someone's going to drive from four or five miles away, park in the parking garage, come in to pick up their brake fluid and leave," Winters said.

Mayor MIro Weinberger is convinced the store will succeed because it fills a need.

"One of the more common complaints is that over the years there's been a shift away from having merchants that meet the daily needs of local residents and people working downtown," Weinberger said. "This goes to the heart of that. Everybody agreed it would be great to have a hardware store back in the downtown."

'Eight feet of gas cans'

Winters has packed nearly everything he carries in his typical 10,000-square-foot store into the 4,000-square-foot location in Burlington, which has far less shelf space to fill.

"In another store we might have eight feet of gas cans, here we have two feet, but usually in a downtown situation someone wants something quickly," Winters said. "You might not have 20 different styles of gas cans, but you have something."

City Hardware's shelves offer shiny red gas cans in one-gallon, two-gallon and five-gallon sizes. The shelves also extend higher than in a larger store, giving the feel of a traditional hardware store in New York or Boston, Winters said.

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If the selection of gas cans is limited, the selection of shovels nearly fills a wall at the back of the store, with shovels of many shapes and sizes, narrow to wide.

"This may be way too much," Winters muses, gazing at the shovel selection. "Someone's going to need a shovel, but this is going to get condensed."

Locally owned

City Hardware had its soft opening last week, and will have a grand opening in the spring. There was no sign on the store as of Friday, just a sandwich board out front, but Winters said the sign will be up soon.

Winters is optimistic about City Hardware's success, thanks in part to Vermonters' loyalty to locally owned stores, but he's also well aware of the pressures being placed on brick-and-mortar retail.

"We'd be foolish not to think Amazon is sitting in an office somewhere, trying to figure out how to get in our business," Winters said.

Contact Dan D’Ambrosio at 660-1841 or ddambrosio@freepressmedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @DanDambrosioVT.