Focus, the Vermont photography gallery currently situated at 23 Elm Street in Woodstock Village, will relocate this fall to the building at 19 Central Street in the heart of the village following the upcoming foliage season.
Thalia Tringo, the Somerville, Mass.-based real estate broker who owns the historic 19th-century building at 19 Central Street that previously housed the Woodstock Pharmacy until the venerable drug store’s closure in 2020, reported in an email to the Standard that she signed a lease on the first-floor retail space with Focus gallery photographers and proprietors Loren Fisher, Ron Lake and Bob Wagner last Friday, Aug. 1. Tringo said she had tried unsuccessfully multiple times over the past several years to bring a restaurant into the Central Street location but opted to rent the retail space to the photo gallery when the efforts to locate an eatery there did not bear fruit.
“Unfortunately, the [new occupant] is not a food tenant as I had hoped,” Tringo wrote to the Standard after the lease was inked. “But it is a good second choice: a photo gallery,” she continued. The choice of the Focus gallery to occupy the fabled setting in the center of Woodstock Village is a fitting one, historically speaking, Tringo pointed out. “As you know, there was a photographer’s gallery on the second floor of the building in the 1870s,” the Central Street property owner noted. “Although food was my first choice and I met with many potential food tenants over the past two years, the cost of building out a kitchen in a building that has not had one, coupled with the local staffing challenges, have proven to be significant obstacles,” Tringo added. “I was pleased to offer the space to Focus gallery, since they are local folks with an existing business in need of a new, more visible location.”
For more on this, please see our August 7 edition of the Vermont Standard.
