They were within a mile of New York City, the business capital of the country, but instead, they chose to ply their trade in the Jersey burg across the river. Why did five diverse business owners set up shop in Downtown Jersey City?
Flash back with Hala Vintage
Hala Schlub has always had an obsession with fashion, especially the classic styles of days gone by.
“When I was growing up, I would go to a lot of thrift shops and garage sales,” said Schlub, co-owner of downtown Jersey City’s Hala Vintage with her boyfriend, Scott Sjobakken. “I’ve been collecting for a long time.”
Her collection eventually grew so large, in fact, that it just made good sense to start selling it. “My boyfriend said, ‘We’ve got to do something about this,’ ” Schlub said. “So we opened up the store.”
Offering vintage clothing, jewelry and accessories from the 1920s through the ’80s, Hala Vintage opened in early 2003. It was the first business venture for Schlub, who lives right above the store.
“I always figured I would open a store wherever I was living,” she said. “The store is always something I wanted to have.”
Before coming to Jersey City four years ago, Schlub had moved from Louisiana, where she grew up, to New York. When she took a job in the fashion industry, Schlub said she had found what she really loved to do.
“My goal was to open the store, take the opportunity, and do what I want to do,” she said.
While the storefront is well-known in its neighborhood, Hala Vintage does much of its business through online sales and direct sales to design and fashion companies such as Burberry, which bought a large collection of jewelry from Hala last fall to sell in their stores.
“That’s kind of the direction I’d like things to go in now, supplying larger companies,” Schlub said.
But Schlub said she would never get rid of the storefront. As a former visual merchandiser for a fashion company in New York, Schlub said she loves creating unique and interesting merchandise displays.
Besides, she added, “It’s always nice to meet new people around the neighborhood.”
Hala Vintage is located at 326 5th St. Call (201) 653-8877.
Get organic at Subia’s Café
For those with a health-conscious diet, Subia’s Café and Market in Historic Downtown offers a full range of organic cheeses, breads and pastas, coffees and teas, frozen products, and on-site organic juicing, plus a bakery section offering scones, muffins and hot organic meals for dining in or to go.
Owners Yvonne and Nilsa Rodriguez said Subia’s is an attempt to offer something for everyone.
“We try to cater to a couple of different types of people,” Yvonne said. “It’s really a little of everything that’s helped us move along.”
The sisters grew up in Jersey City and still live in the Historic Downtown neighborhood. The storefront once belonged to their parents, who operated a bodega in the space. Yvonne said that she and Nilsa wanted to keep their parents’ shop because they love the area.
“My roots are here,” she said.
The sisters first thought of converting their parents’ shop into an organic store when health issues in the family compelled them to delve into the organic way of life. They waited several years to open Subia’s until 2003, when they decided the time was right for the neighborhood.
“It was ready for an organic store,” Yvonne said.
Yvonne noted that the shop’s regulars are pleased that they don’t have to head out of town for organic foods. They can find it right in Jersey City.
“The demand is there,” she said. “A lot of people are very happy that we’re here.”
Yvonne added that newcomers are often pleasantly surprised to discover the store.
“When it’s nice out and people start to take walks,” Yvonne said, “people will walk by and say ‘we didn’t realize you were here.’ ”
Subia’s recently began offering a hot menu of vegan foods – free of all animal products, including dairy. Besides their growing selection of foods, Yvonne said that word of mouth has been key to the shop’s success.
“People tell people who tell people,” she said, “so by word of mouth more and more people have been coming in.”
Subia’s Café and Market is located at 506 Jersey Ave. Call (201) 432-7639.
Metropolis Music hits all the right notes
Metropolis Music opened in Historic Downtown Jersey City in November of 2002, offering sales of instruments and supplies as well as professional music lessons. Over the past couple of years, the full-line music store – which recently underwent a major expansion – has grown with the booming neighborhood.
“When I first opened the store, we were kind of at the fringe of civilization here, so there wasn’t too much out there,” said Mark Dalzell, co-owner of Metropolis with his wife, Christine. “But since we’ve opened, there’s a lot of businesses that have opened that are doing well. We’re practically back in the middle of things, even just after a couple of years.”
Dalzell said that Jersey City’s reasonable cost of living attracted him and his wife to the city five years ago. “We took one look at the Manhattan rents, and it kind of seemed like a no-brainer,” he said. “It didn’t seem to make any kind of sense to pay twice as much rent to live on the Upper East Side.”
Dalzell and his wife now live just a few blocks from the store, and the Historic Downtown neighborhood has provided them with not just their customer base, but the very inspiration for opening Metropolis to begin with. “There’s a really large concentration of musicians around here,” Dalzell noted. “The city was sorely in need of a music store.”
Metropolis Music has been filling that need with instrument sales, sheet music, music supplies and private lessons on pretty much any instrument you could want to learn. Dalzell employs more than a dozen instructors to handle the demand for music lessons, and no one is more surprised at the popularity of the lessons than Dalzell himself.
“The store is most known now for private lessons. That’s probably the number one thing people come in and ask about,” he said. “My goal was to get 20 to 25 students in. We hit that in about six months and we’ve just been growing since.”
Metropolis Music is located at 240 Newark Ave. Call (201) 222-8441 or visit www.metropolisnj.com.
Make yourself at home at Tia’s Place
For a contemporary shopping experience with a twist, Tia’s Place displays clothing and accessories for men, women and children in furniture that is also for sale.
“Everything is displayed in furniture,” noted Megan O’Sullivan, the owner of Tia’s Place, which opened on part of the old Majestic Theatre property in Historic Downtown in June of last year. “We have a display bed; the bed is for sale as well as the bedding. All our lighting is chandeliers, and we sell the chandeliers.”
Tia’s Place has become a real family affair for O’Sullivan, whose aunt and mother, Sandy, refinish the store’s furniture themselves, a trade they learned from their parents.
After growing up in nearby Scotch Plains, O’Sullivan worked for several years in Jersey City’s financial district, watching firsthand as the city began an economic and cultural boom. The influx of young families to the area is part of what inspired O’Sullivan to open her store here.
“When I was looking to do the store, I looked all over,” she said. “But I really liked the neighborhood here. It’s such a neighborhood feel for an urban area. The people around here are really nice, really supportive. It’s a great, eclectic group of people.”
To maintain that sense of community when people come into her store, O’Sullivan said she encourages customers to sit and chat or have a cup of coffee while shopping for apparel and furnishings.
“I really want people to enjoy it,” she said. “I want people to have a good time when they come in, to look around and spend some time here.”
With that kind of friendly attitude, O’Sullivan said she hopes Tia’s Place will become part of a neighborhood that will encourage visitors to spend some time strolling around and enjoying the area.
“There are so many great places here,” she said. “You can actually come down and walk around for the day. And I don’t think that people really know that outside of the immediate neighborhood.”
Tia’s Place is located at 277 Grove St. Call (201) 451-9358 or visit www.tiasplace.biz.
Hit the Links at Pro Golf
Lifelong Hudson County resident Steve Panayiotou has set quite a lofty goal for Pro Golf: “to be the best full-service golf shop in the area.”
And with a complete line of golf equipment, accessories and apparel, a club repair shop, and a virtual golf simulator featuring 13 championship courses, Panayiotou has found himself well on the way to meeting his objective.
For his first venture into the golf business, Panayiotou used his savvy managing to pick a plum location in Jersey City. In fact, Panayiotou attributed much of Pro Golf’s success to its Jersey City location. Positioned just outside the Holland Tunnel, and in an Urban Enterprise Zone, the store offers golf enthusiasts in the metropolitan area the dual incentives of both a convenient location and reduced sales tax.
“We do get a lot of traffic from New York City, and we offer three percent sales tax as well,” Panayiotou noted.
Panayiotou said he expects the warm months of spring and summer to draw in a steady stream of customers looking to enjoy the weather by hitting the links.
“I’m excited about the upcoming season,” he said.
But Pro Golf’s opening month in December of last year was just as much a success, with the influx of holiday crowds – particularly out-of-towners looking to take advantage of Jersey City’s tax incentives – driving up Pro Golf’s off-season sales.
Panayiotou said that prior to last December, Jersey City had been in need of a full-service golf shop, and that Pro Golf is meeting the demand that had existed for quite some time.
“There’s a definite customer base,” he said, “and there’s no one here to fill that market, so I’m just filling a void.”
Pro Golf is located at 125 18th St. Call (201) 798-4653.