There’s no firm date for the day the showroom closes at Dixie Store Fixtures. The business may still make it the century mark as it fulfills contracts and distributions, but things are definitely winding down.

“There’s no date,” Fred Cypress, the president of the corporation said. " We have no lease expiring. We’re doing it in a very leisurely manner."

Cypress is the third generation of his family to lead the company, founded in 1921. Dixie Store Fixtures offers food service equipment and supplies. The showroom on First Avenue North will stay open as long as there are still items to sell, he said.

“First Avenue North is the only street we’ve ever been on,” Cypress said. “We stuck around downtown when everybody else left.”

The story of Dixie Store Fixtures mirrors the transformation of downtown Birmingham. The company began selling equipment to drug stores, long before the days of McDonald’s, before restaurant chains elbowed each other for valuable space along nearly every city street.

By the early 1960s, the family also operated an equipment plant and storefront on 15th Street North and 11th Avenue downtown, but the state of Alabama took the property through eminent domain to build what is now known as Malfunction Junction, the intersection of Interstates 59/20 and 65.

The company changed with the times, making the transition to restaurants, and then to institutional clients such as hospitals, nursing homes, schools, prisons and stadiums. When you’re nearing the century mark, that means a lot of pots, pans, knives, ovens, refrigerators, tea dispensers, ketchup bottles and other assorted kitchen necessities have passed through its doors.

Dixie Store Fixtures also provided equipment for Atlanta’s Georgia Dome and won a contract in 1996 to supply equipment for Olympic Stadium for the Summer Games in Atlanta. Despite those high-profile projects, the company stayed mostly within its North Alabama footprint, Cypress said.

“I’m a bit of a control freak,” he said. “I don’t like to send our people all over the country. We’ve got friends all over who do what we do.”

Cypress, who just turned sixty, began working at the business when he was 11. Back then, Birmingham had many more family-owned businesses, within a different commercial landscape. Employees stayed for decades, and business relationships were built through regular interaction.

Yet Dixie Store Fixtures isn’t being chased out of the business by the Internet or mergers. Cypress said he is ready to retire.

“This is by choice," he said. “This is not by necessity. I feel great. I’ve got a lot of friends. In the short term, my wife and I are looking to care for our parents. But we’re also getting a chance to do a few things we want to while we’re still healthy enough to do them. A lot of people are excited for us."