Walking down Greenwich Street recently, I came upon a sight that chilled my West Villager’s heart: a giant For Rent sign in the main window of Garber’s hardware at 710 Greenwich and Charles Streets. It’s a store I have relied on ever since I moved to the neighborhood in the 80s, with particularly heavy patronage in the years when my two sons were enthusiastic young carpenters.
Behind that window the space had been vacated. The store’s entrance is now up the stoop of the smaller adjunct space next door, in recent years home to the kitchen and cleaning supplies, glues and other sundries. I couldn’t make the situation compute: they couldn’t possibly pack the myriad products into that narrow room. What gives? I wanted to know.
Rather than jump to dark conclusions, I called Nathaniel Garber Schoen, current co-owner of the business with his cousin Scott, both fifth-generation Garbers. The store—quite possibly the oldest hardware store in the city and certainly the oldest still owned and managed by the same family—is in its 142nd year, having evolved from a pushcart run by father and son Joseph and Nathan Garber, who immigrated to the US to escape pogroms in Russian.
The pushcart gave way to the original store at 49 Eighth Ave. It gradually expanded until it had an impressive presence on the block between Jane and Horatio Streets. The multiple orange signs, running horizontally and vertically, were as much a West Village landmark as the White Horse Tavern’s black and white facade.
2003 relocation
Garbers begat Garbers. The neighborhood grew more desirable and all that street frontage begat high overhead. When the building sold, Garber’s got out ahead of the inevitable rent increase in 2003 by moving from the beaten track of Eighth Avenue to the quieter Greenwich Street location. In 2016 Nathaniel, who goes by Nat, opened a Chelsea outpost on Ninth Avenue. The crusty greatest-generation Garber men retired. Tom died three years ago. Nat’s father George still—to quote Nat—”rears his head occasionally, coming by to help out and to visit the nieces and nephews.”
I took Nat up on his offer to stop by for a tour and an interview. It was 10 on a Tuesday morning and he was busy helping customers and solving problems at the new counter, which is now just past the entrance on the right. “Take a look around,” he told me. “Make sure to go downstairs.”
Then I went down the freshly painted white stairwell to the lower level. In what used to be used for storage (and occasional Halloween parties and even an evening of stage plays), I found the paint and furniture finishing departments, along with unwieldy items like wading pools and trash cans.
Nat and I then sat outside on the stoop for our interview, accompanied by Kang the Conqueror, his sweet Staffordshire terrier, the successor to his Rottweiler Kodos the Destroyer (both named for Simpsons’ Treehouse of Horror characters).
“Your dog and my dog used to say hello,” I reminded him; I wasn’t sure how well he remembered either of us from our occasional encounters over the years.
“Rugelach,” Nat said, flooring me—my dog, who died in 2020, was named Ruggles, and we always told people his British name was Ruggles but his Yiddish name was Rugelach.
As for the new configuration, Nat insisted that the store still has the same amount of usable square footage. “We had never fully utilized this side of the space,” he explained. As part of a renovation and rearranging done in July 2025, they had torn down a wall in the rear and given up the big office behind it to make the current space deeper. When I observed that the kitchen department had contracted, he said that all the inventory is still around, but in the consolidation some items haven’t yet received the love and attention they need.
Nat didn’t offer any numbers, but left me with the impression that Garber’s is doing okay. He assured me that the store still gets loads of business from contractors. He is hopeful the landlord will find a good tenant for the recently vacated space, one that will bring much-needed foot traffic to Greenwich Street.
Ambiance not that important
It’s true that the store, whose landlord is the condo above, now offers a purely utilitarian shopping experience. But who goes to a hardware store for ambiance? Even the old Eighth Avenue store, with its warren of rooms, felt pretty ad hoc and cramped. More important is whether you can get your hands on the exact wing nut or length of pipe or junction box you desperately need that day.
That morning before I arrived, Nat had already cut some bed legs for a walk-in customer, following in the fine tradition of even the most crusty Garber’s employees of yore. Nat’s father or uncle, I’m not sure which, once rewired a lamp for me—with not a word of pleasantries but also no charge for labor.
Rumors of Garber’s demise crop up each time the store makes a change. Nat insists there are no plans to close. In fact, he said, during the recent consolidation in February, the store shut its doors for only two days. During the great February blizzard, the Chelsea store did close, but only so the employees could come down to the Village to help the “flagship” stay open and sell out every bit of snow equipment they had. The store’s 150th anniversary is coming up in eight years. “We have enough years on our lease to get us beyond that,” he insisted, though he can’t say what might happen after that.
Nat described himself with a term I’d never heard before: “I’m a stockist. I know where to find stuff; I know what can be gotten wholesale.”
He told me that Garber’s delivers good value. “We’ve done videos with influencers who come in with a shopping list. They price us against Amazon and Home Depot, and our total price is always better, though certain individual items may cost a little more. The difference is more than worth the cost of a Prime membership.”
I asked if he had a message for the neighborhood. The longtime West Villager did indeed. “Go to stores!” he said. “Go to the bodega, the supermarket! It’s not an act of charity to shop in a store; it’s good for you and good for your community. The stuff I see in my lobby! Eight rolls of toilet paper from Amazon. The other day someone had a plunger delivered. Just a regular plunger. Live in your city!”
