The Shoparooni website is still up, but the phone has been disconnected. I’m glad I bought a keychain there before the store closed.
Music Saves and the Beachland Ballroom & Tavern continue to draw customers, and the Waterloo Café at the corner of Waterloo Road and East 156th Street, serves modern, healthy food. For a full, equally imaginative menu, visit nearby Grovewood Tavern & Wine Bar, a magnet for people far beyond North Collinwood. There are art galleries, another vinyl-heavy record store called Blue Arrow, there’s even a yo-yo club.There’s life in the Waterloo Arts District. Traction is another matter.
It’s sad you can still Google Shoparooni, but you can’t get in the door. It shut down December 30, some 26 months after Steve and Marlee Brown opened it.
I found this out on January 5, a week after I interviewed store manager Heather Young, the self-styled “maven of merch”. A follow-up phone call took me to a recording that noted Shoparooni’s phone was “temporarily disconnected,” a strong indication something was wrong. When I later returned, a sign told me Shoparooni was closed. At Music Saves, co-owner Melanie Hershberger told me Young had come into her record store on December 30 with the sad news.
Selling Kid Robo tchotchkes, wacky art by local creatives, risqué, funny books, T-shirts with cool cartoons sounds like fun. So does feeling like you’re part of a creative class trying to brand the Waterloo Arts District as a destination.
“People who want this kind of merchandise will seek it out and find it.”
Young gave no indication Shoparooni was in trouble when I interviewed her. True, there wasn’t a lot of inventory, the dress rack was meager, and she said the store would no longer carry footwear. But there was all manner of largely local art skewing toward pop culture, toward kitsch. Among the offerings: drawings of “Ghosteez” on hangable wood blocks by Matthew Ryan Sharp of Crest Hill, Illinois; T shirts by “Dr. Sketchy,” a design collective headed by Jason Tilk of Cleveland Heights; “modern monster” plush toys by Clevelander John Cycyk; those Kid Robo adult designer toys; and Scrabble tile necklaces by Marlee Brown, now sole owner of Shoparooni.
All this stuff felt at home.
“People who want this kind of merchandise will seek it out and find it,” Young told me. “Anyone can open a store on Coventry; you have a different type of clientele.
"The Beachland’s the anchor on the street. This is the Waterloo Arts District. There’s nothing Big Fun about here, because we don’t carry that kind of product. We sell contemporary culture merchandise. It’s contemporary trends, it’s things of the new.”
And, like Big Fun, Steve Presser’s nostalgia-driven pop culture emporia on Coventry in Cleveland Heights and on Detroit Road in Lakewood, it’s all about things that are discretionary.
I bought a keychain at Shoparooni because the paint on my old one, featuring the anime character Totoro, was fading. My new accessory, a mini jackrabbit designed by talented British artist Brian Taylor, is cute. It didn’t cost much, either.
I had no idea it would be such a souvenir.
A clearance sale should be announced soon. OhioAuthority.com will post that information as it becomes available.
