Blue Line Bike Lab #2 - East End

The window stickers started coming down yesterday, and the open sign will be gone forever by the end of today. We've made the decision to close our East End location for good, and there's no turning back now.

We opened our Eastside outpost back in the fall of 2012. My wife and I were expecting our baby in December, and we were in the middle of a tense lease renegotiation on our White Oak building. We'd learned through the grapevine that several commercial realtors representing a couple of local restaurant groups were making inquiries on our property, and it wasn't looking great. Right about the time we found out about that, my friend Keith came by and told me that not only had he and Jessica bought Bohemeo's, but that his uncle actually owned the whole center and would be open to leasing me a space at a great lease rate. If you know me, you know that I'm more of a doer than a planner, and in the blink of an eye we'd signed a lease and started building out.

There's a lot of small reasons that we've chosen to shutter our East End doors, and it's not all because of Covidtimes. There's no doubt that a lack of ability to reinventory the store was the last straw, but the truth is that the numbers haven't been very good over there for a few years and at the end of the day we've just been breaking even on Telephone Road. This business is too damned hard to just break even, and after moving into our giant new building on Yale we feel like it's much more efficient to concentrate our efforts on our flagship store in the Heights. We hope that our friends in the East End will make the extra 7 mile drive to come see us on Yale.

We've had a good almost eight year run over there, and we've met a lot of great folks and made some really awesome friends thanks to that store. We're going to miss those lazy autumn days, hanging out on the patio at Bo's after work. Don't worry about us though, the Heights location is doing better than ever and we'll still be here for the decades ahead. Thank you for the support over the years, and we'll see you in the Heights!

-Fred Zapalac, Blue Line Bike Lab