Brittons, a locally-owned clothing store, opened its current location on Devine Street on May 1, 1996. According to store owner Staci Levinson it was an especially busy time because she and Perry Lancaster were getting ready to get married. At the same time, they were preparing for the move from Dutch Square Mall to Devine Street. They had received a notice from the mall a month earlier that they were being kicked out.
“We didn’t have any money,” Levinson said. “We had just come out of a reorganization. Moving to Devine Street was viewed by my parents as moving back to our people. Not that Dutch Square wasn’t our people, but for my parents it was kind of like coming back home.
“We were fighting for our existence. We had to find a location. We had to move a store we had been in since 1969 that was a combination of all our stores put together, and we had to find a location we could afford and find builders to build it. And we were getting married on the same week. We came here, and three years later, we had clawed our way back to what people remember Brittons being.”…