Elizabeth, 8, and Katherine, 11, Dolata and Elizabeth Delgado, 10, pick flavors at the Baskin-Robbins in Fairfax City, Va., on its final day in business. (Dayna Smith for the Washington Post)

After 54 years, 31 flavors (and then some) and more than 29 million scoops, a venerable Fairfax City sweet spot has served its last cups and cones.

The Baskin-Robbins Ice Cream shop that was a summer-night destination for thousands of families and a first job for countless high-schoolers closed Sunday in the name of a wider and drier Fairfax Boulevard.

Construction on a huge state-funded reworking of storm-water and traffic flow at Route 50 and Chain Bridge Road will lop off the corner of Fairfax Shopping Center where the franchise, once one of the East Coast’s busiest, has operated since 1962.

“It’s been part of Fairfax for a long time,” said Fairfax Mayor Scott Silverthorne, one of dozens of longtime patrons and former employees who came to a goodbye party at the shop last week.

Owner Syed Ahmed, who bought the shop in 2001, said Silverthorne and city officials have been helping him look for another location in the city for the past year. Nothing has popped up of the right size or far enough from existing ice cream or frozen yogurt outlets.

Lilu Koontz, 1, gets an upside-down view into the ice cream display case. Lilu's mother, Linda, left, previously worked at the store. (Dayna Smith for the Washington Post)

Under his franchise agreement with Baskin-Robbins, Ahmed has a year from closing to find a new home, and he expects to receive about $75,000 in relocation assistance from the Virginia Department of Transportation. A flower shop, barber shop, futon store and sports memorabilia business also are being dislocated by the project.

“I think we will find [another location]. I hope we will find something,” said Ahmed, who spent much of Sunday coming around the counter to hug mournful customers and former workers dropping by to say goodbye. Ice-cream cakes were selling well, as they always do on Easter. But so were nostalgic purchases of old-favorite cones and sundaes.

“It’s just so sad,” said Linda Koontz, who sipped a moody chocolate and peanut butter milkshake as she thought back on the five years in the early 2000s when she wore the B-R tunic and sold the cold for hungry Fairfax residents. “I wish I could stay here all day and eat one of everything.”

Jeff Stahle, 55, whose family owned the store for three decades before selling it to his friend Syed, teared up as he reflected on the spot where he started serving ice cream at age 11, hired and mentored students from Robinson, Fairfax and Woodson high schools and even met his wife (a lover of mint chocolate chip).

“It’s not so much the physical place as the relationships with people,” Stahle said, his eyes filling. His daughter Rachel, sitting next to a collection of vintage Baskin-Robbins uniforms that Stahle had brought, cast him a smile and shook her head. “She knows I’m a softie,” he said, laughing.

Stahle broke off to go hug a man walking in with three kids. David Dolata, a Fairfax property manager, worked here in the early ’90s. He, too, met his wife behind the counter, and two of the kids are Baskin-Robbins progeny.

All day, amid the vintage uniforms and memories of flavors gone by (1962’s “Beatle Nut,” anyone? Or “Miami Ice” from 1986?), those who scooped and those who licked came by to pay homage to a shop that dished almost 25,000 gallons of the cold and creamy a year on average, by Stahle’s estimate.

Jars of ice cream toppings at Baskin Robbins. (Dayna Smith for the Washington Post)

And Stahle still has the Fairfax Mayor’s Cup that the shop won in 1988 for Best Entry in the town’s Fourth of July parade. The theme of their float? Washington crossing the Delaware in a banana split boat. It was a high-visibility ice cream parlor, one that posted the highest sales in the company’s Eastern region for nine straight years in the 1970s.

“I remember so often my buddies and I playing in the back yard, and then my dad would take us all to that Baskin-Robbins,” said Silverthorne, whose father, Frederick W. Silverthorne, also served as Fairfax mayor.

Susan Shriver Timmermeyer, 46, now a second-grade teacher, came on crutches to salute the shop where she got her first job as a 15-year-old sophomore at Robinson Secondary School in 1985. Like most workers, she followed a friend onto the staff, making the shop as much a social scene behind the counter as in front, when long lines of neighbors sometimes snaked down the sidewalk.

“It was just the hangout,” said Timmermeyer, who slung ice cream for three years and a couple of college summers. She quickly made enough to buy her first stereo, the $200 JVC with turntable and cassette deck that she still has. “It was a great job. It’s where I learned to make ice-cream cakes.”

Over the years, the workforce shifted from part-time teenagers to full-time adults, often immigrants seeking a foothold in the American economy. The store’s current staff dwindled to four as the closing approached, Ahmed said, and he’s invited all of those to work at a Baskin-Robbins location he owns in Falls Church.

That’s good news for Sharmin Sabina, 27, who came to the United States from Bangladesh four years ago. She’s been scooping Baskin-Robbins for three of them, and even though she’s lost her taste for ice cream (a professional hazard), she does like the work.

“This was my first job in America,” Sabina said between customers. “This is a happy place.”