Washington and Harvard Streets have been meeting at the same angle since 1847, when the arrival of the Boston and Albany Railroad pulled the commercial center of Brookline down from the old Town Green to follow the new line. Everything since has happened inside that triangle: the clock that reads Francis J. Hickey Triangle, the brick storefronts, the Town Hall a block over. The triangle doesn't announce when a business is testing whether it can survive a transition. It just keeps the same intersection running while the storefronts around it answer that question one at a time. This past year it produced two answers worth setting side by side, a shop that couldn't find anyone to take it over, and a few doors up, a shop that reopened under the exact owner who built it in the first place.
Curds&co's Search for a Buyer
According to Brookline.News, Curds&co served its last customer on September 12, 2025. The cheese shop at 288 Washington Street had been slicing wedges and hosting tasting classes since 2017, run by Jenn and Matt Mason until they moved to Sicily in 2023. From there, they kept the lease alive and asked their daughters, Becky and Abi, to run the counter while they searched for someone to buy the business outright. Two years of looking never turned up a buyer. In a farewell note posted before closing, the Masons thanked landlord Richard Allen for stretching their lease long enough to make one more push, and closed with a line about missing the mongers who'd worn the apron: "you are what will be missed most in our little hamlet of cheesedom."
That phrase is worth sitting with. It puts the people behind the counter at the center of the goodbye. You can sell the inventory and the lease. You can't as easily sell the eight years of knowing which regular likes their brie funky and which one wants the mild stuff for a kid's lunchbox.
The Shop That Reopened Without Selling
A short walk up Harvard Street, Sorriso Market just did the opposite thing. Nick Lisotto opened the wine, pasta, and art shop at 27 Harvard Street in December 2020, milling his own pasta grains and building a wine cellar with vintages going back to the 1800s. Earlier this month, about a year after curds&co's last day, he reopened it, not to a new owner, but under his own hand, with what Brookline.News describes as a shifted focus on building community.
That contrast is worth noting, but it doesn't establish why either shop took the path it did.
If you're trying to read what keeps a small commercial corner like this one intact, these accounts offer a snapshot, not a rule. Storefronts turn over, and the two outcomes show that transitions can take different forms.
What Never Had to Choose
Not every business on these two streets is having a moment of transition, and the ones that aren't are worth naming precisely because they're not news. Martin's Coffee Shop at 35 Harvard Street has been running the same diner counter since 1918, serving omelets and stuffed French toast to a crowd that includes plenty of people who've been ordering the same thing for decades. Clear Flour Bread on Thorndike Street has spent years building the kind of daily line that doesn't depend on who owns the lease down the block, because people show up for the bread, not the neighbor.
These two offer a contrast to the Curds&co story. Martin's Coffee Shop has operated since 1918, and Clear Flour Bread has spent years building a daily line. They are familiar businesses along these streets.
The Rhythm That Keeps Running Regardless
Ownership churn on Washington and Harvard hasn't touched the other thing that makes Brookline Village feel like a single neighborhood rather than a strip of shops: the recurring events that don't belong to any one storefront. On the third Thursday of most months, Arts Brookline runs open studios up and down Station Street, and this fall that means free workshops and demonstrations at:
- Station Street Studios
- Hipstitch
- Village Works
- Feet of Clay Pottery
None of that depends on who's behind the counter at 288 Washington or 27 Harvard. It depends on a handful of working artists who've built their practices into the Village's back rooms and keep the door open once a month regardless of what's happening two blocks over.
Two Reasons to Be Outside Before the Season Turns
If you've been meaning to get to the Village on a weekend, there are two specific windows left before the calendar changes shape. The Sunday farmers market at the Brookline War Memorial parklet, the small green space locals call the Cannon, runs from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. through October 25. It's the kind of stop that rewards showing up more than once, since the produce table looks different in early September than it will in the last week of the season.
And Brookline Day lands on Sunday, September 27, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., the Recreation Department's annual celebration of the town as a place to live, work, and play. It's not a Village-specific event, but the Village's own businesses and civic buildings sit close enough to the middle of it that it's worth circling regardless of which part of Brookline you call home.
The Same Two Streets, One Year Apart
Put the closing and the reopening side by side and the twelve months between them stop looking like a gap and start looking like the point. Curds&co and Sorriso Market sit within a few hundred feet of each other on streets that have anchored this neighborhood since before either business existed. Curds&co closed after a two-year search for a buyer, while Sorriso Market reopened under its founder. Neither outcome says anything bad about the Village. The two businesses took different paths.
That's not a reason to worry about the corner. Martin's is still slinging eggs Benedict after more than a century. Clear Flour still has its line. Arts Brookline still opens its studio doors every third Thursday whether or not anything else on the block has changed hands. The Village absorbed one closing and, a year later, one reopening, and kept its shape either way, because the shape was never really about any one storefront. It was about the corner itself, the same corner that's been catching foot traffic since the railroad first pulled the town's center down from the old Green.
If you've been watching this stretch of the Village and wondering what it means for your own plans here, whether you're thinking about your next move or just trying to read the neighborhood you already live in, Eileen Strong O'Boy has spent more than three decades tracking exactly this kind of block-by-block detail across Brookline and Chestnut Hill. A home valuation conversation is a good excuse to talk through what's actually happening on your own street, not just what a portal algorithm says it's worth.
