"The mix is critical, and the mix that I have seen that has been coming here into Coolidge Corner is a real concern," says David Leschinsky, who has owned Eureka! Puzzles & Games on Beacon Street long enough to watch several waves of storefronts come and go. He is not wrong to worry. This summer alone, Coolidge Corner lost Golden Temple, Party Favors, Kaojiu, and Sanela Salon, on top of a GameStop that closed earlier in 2026. But walk the same stretch of Harvard Street today and what you find moving into those spaces tells a different story than the one the vacancy signs suggest.
The businesses closing this year and the businesses opening this year are not, for the most part, competing over the same customer. That distinction matters more than the raw count of storefronts changing hands, and it is the part of the story that gets flattened when every closure gets lumped into a single "is the neighborhood struggling" narrative.
The Closures Aren't One Story
It is tempting to read four or five storefronts going dark in a single season as a single trend. The actual causes are not that tidy.
Some of it is straightforward cost pressure. Steven Peljovich, who owns Michael's Deli on Harvard Street, put it plainly: "It's a whole other world now because everyone's stretched." Ingredient costs have climbed since the pandemic while customers have gotten more cautious with discretionary spending, and that combination leaves little room to raise menu prices without losing the customer altogether.
Some of it is bad luck with a bureaucratic tail. A fire in January 2026 that started in the basement of Painted Burro, a restaurant in Washington Square, spread into the neighboring wine shop Vinodivino. As of early June 2026, the most recent reporting available, both were still dark, not because customers had stopped coming but because insurance disputes and delayed electrical repairs kept the doors closed. That is a closure with nothing to say about neighborhood health. It is a closure with an insurance adjuster's name on it.
And some of it, per Leschinsky, is a pattern Coolidge Corner has lived through before. He describes a recurring cycle of "trend" businesses: frozen yogurt shops, then ice cream parlors, then nail salons, then barber shops, each wave of entrepreneurs chasing a concept that looked successful until the neighborhood proved it could not support four or five versions of the same storefront at once. When one of those overbuilt categories thins out, the closure looks like decline from the outside. It is closer to a correction.
None of this is a verdict on whether Coolidge Corner is thriving or slipping. It is a reminder that four storefronts closing in the same season can have four different explanations, and only one of those explanations has anything to do with whether people still want to shop and eat here.
What's Actually Moving Back In
Here is where the mix Leschinsky worries about starts to look, at least for now, like it is correcting itself rather than repeating.
At 406 Harvard Street, the space Kaojiu left behind was getting new signage for Yu Yue Bar & BBQ as of early June 2026, a straightforward restaurant-to-restaurant swap that keeps the storefront in its existing lane. But look at what has landed on Harvard Street over the last two years and the more interesting pattern shows up in categories the corridor did not have before at all.
Marky's Caviar opened a retail shop and eight-seat caviar bar at 420 Harvard Street in the spring of 2025, next to the existing Tatte. The company is the only one in the United States legally producing purebred Beluga caviar, raised at its own Sturgeon Aquafarms in Florida, and its Brookline location pairs retail caviar sales with a bar menu built entirely around caviar flights, roe, and Champagne. It is not competing with the deli down the block or the coffee shop across the street. It is a destination in a category Coolidge Corner simply did not have a version of before.
PLNT Burger, co-founded by Seth Goldman of Honest Tea, opened in December 2024 at 297 Harvard Street directly across from the Coolidge Corner Theatre, its interior built around a mural by Boston artist Mark Grundig depicting the neighborhood itself. Blank Street Coffee, a New York-born chain known for its mint green storefronts, opened its largest Boston-area location at 455 Harvard Street in the spring of 2025, a 1,700 square foot, 28-seat space that dwarfs its typical under-350-square-foot footprint elsewhere. Each of these is a chain, but each is also testing a genuinely different occasion for the neighborhood rather than adding a fourth version of something Coolidge Corner already had three of.
That is the part worth sitting with. If Leschinsky's worry is about too many businesses fighting over the same narrow slice of foot traffic, the storefronts actually filling in are, so far, doing the opposite of what worried him.
The One Across From the Theatre
The clearest current example of that pattern is still finding its footing. Boston General Store, a fixture at 305 Harvard Street for more than a decade, vacated the space in early March 2026 and moved to a larger location at 313A Harvard Street. That left a storefront directly across from the Coolidge Corner Theatre sitting empty through the spring, exactly the kind of visible vacancy that tends to fuel a "the neighborhood is hollowing out" read from anyone walking past.
What is filling it is Glass Ripples, an artisan glassware shop expanding from Cambridge, bringing glass-fusing workshops, glass jewelry classes, and independent artist goods to the space. Owner Sifan Wu told local reporters she had been searching for an affordable spot for almost two years before finding 305 Harvard. "Since Coolidge Corner is a really great location with really good foot traffic, I could afford to pay a little more," she said. The Brookline Planning Board reviewed the storefront's sign and façade permit on June 24, 2026, and Wu is targeting a grand opening in late September or early October of this year.
A glass-fusing workshop is not a category Coolidge Corner has tested before, and it is not competing with anything currently on Harvard Street for the same customer. If it lands the way Marky's Caviar and PLNT Burger appear to have, it becomes one more data point for a corridor that is diversifying rather than repeating itself.
Why the Mix Matters More Than the Vacancy Count
Leschinsky's own read on this is worth taking seriously precisely because he is not an optimist by default: "Destination businesses can survive, but they thrive when there is a supporting ecosystem with lots of other businesses that people want to go to." His concern was never that Coolidge Corner would run out of tenants. It was that the tenants filling in would all chase the same narrow trend until none of them could support the rent.
What is actually showing up on Harvard Street this year, from the caviar bar to the burger concept to the glass studio angling for a fall opening across from the theater, looks less like a repeat of the frozen yogurt cycle and more like a corridor testing several different, non-competing ideas at once. That is not proof the neighborhood has solved the cost pressures Peljovich described at Michael's Deli, and it is not an argument that every vacancy this year was actually good news. The fire at Painted Burro and Vinodivino was still just a fire as of early June, waiting on insurance and electrical work with no relationship to foot traffic at all.
But if you live near Coolidge Corner and have been eyeing the paper on the windows at 305 Harvard Street wondering what the neighborhood is turning into, the honest answer this fall is that it is turning into something more varied than what it lost, not less.
If you are watching Brookline for reasons that go beyond the storefronts, whether you are weighing a move within the neighborhood or curious what a home near Coolidge Corner is actually worth in today's market, Emily Farrar works this area closely enough to talk through what a specific block or building is really like to live on. Book an appointment when you are ready for that conversation.
