For Greeley Sachs, the late-April launch of the Composition Shop was not just a celebration of the opening of a new bookstore to downtown Longmont, but an important step in her years-long effort to revitalize a historic stretch of the city’s Main Street.
Sachs, owner of Composition and of development and construction management firm I-Beam Colorado, has spent the past four years strategically acquiring and renovating a half-dozen storefronts on the 300 block of Main Street, of which the roughly 2,500-square-foot Composition space in a 115-year-old building at 356 Main St. is the most recent.
“It was built in 1910 and has been a number of things over the years,” she said. “For a while, it was a housewares business, probably around the time that it was built, and it’s been a variety of retail businesses. Most recently, it was a gallery for about a decade.”
Sachs spent about three years turning the historic, yet aging Composition space into a store that carries about 10,000 new books…