Baltimore County residents will find it hard to picture downtown Towson without Finkelstein's. The clothing store at 408 York Road, owned and operated by the same family since its inception 72 years ago, helped outfit the county seat as it evolved from a quiet outpost of Baltimore into a busy "edge city" with a population of some 70,000.
But no more. Changes in the ways people shop are forcing both the Towson and Bel Air Finkelstein stores out of business. Finkelstein brothers Arnold and Jack, and Arnold's son Roy, decided the operation is no longer lucrative enough to justify butting heads with the deep-discount chains that now dominate the retail game.
Besides, Arnold is 78; Jack is 65. No one should begrudge the brothers their break after they've labored for decades to keep alive the business founded in 1922 by their Jewish immigrant parents.
Even if other family members wanted to continue, it's doubtful they could match the advantages of the modern shopping mall -- a prime example of which is Towson Town Center, to the north of Finkelstein's. As Jack told The Evening Sun's Ed Brandt, "The modern retailer has the edge and the smarts, and we don't have the ability, the training or the resources to compete with them."
The demise of the Towson shop is significant also in that it will create one more empty storefront on the east side of York Road, which again raises questions about the future of central Towson. For decades, local political and business leaders have held discussion upon discussion, and issued study upon study, in attempts to create a vision for the downtown area. However, these efforts have produced little more than news clippings.
A major stumbling block has been the conflicting desires of the key entities in Towson -- the county and state governments, local businesses and neighborhood groups. Towson, like every other county community, is not a municipality and therefore lacks someone like a mayor who could guide the crafting of a civic vision and then promote it.
The public-private commission known as the Towson Partnership hopes to break this unproductive streak with an upcoming report on ways to improve parking, traffic flow and the appearance of the streetscape in the area. We'll wait to see this latest report before passing a judgment. In the meantime, we have to agree with one prominent member of the partnership, who told us, "I'm pretty tired of all these different visions. It's time we started getting things done."