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FeedPride of Ownership
Stan Zukin can’t get enough of West Chester—real estate, that is.
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Scott Zukin opens the walk-up door to what was once Joel’s Exclusive Dress Shop. Its stucco façade is pristine, save for some graffiti on the alleyway wall. A layer of drywall dust coats the hardwood stairs, and a vacuum can be heard groaning from one of the nearly finished apartments upstairs. On the first level, the 2,300-square-foot retail space is almost complete—soon to be another addition to downtown West Chester’s increasingly diverse dining and retail scene.
Zukin Realty, the business Scott shares with his father, Stan, is just a quick stroll away from this prime Church Street locale. The apartments will rent for $1,800-$2,000 a month. They’re stunning two-story, three-bedroom units with modern kitchens, massive bathrooms and ample natural light—thanks to the preserved transom windows throughout. Less than a year ago, the building was a lawsuit waiting to happen.
“It was so bad that we had to sign a waiver before entering, in case we were hurt,” Scott says. “I’ve never had to do that before. The floors were rotted out.”
A furniture restoration expert turned renovation impresario, Scott is otherwise modest about the building’s turnaround. The level of quality—the emphasis on preserving rather than gutting—is business as usual for him and his father. It’s a pattern they’ve repeated throughout West Chester, the place they call home and where they prefer to do business.
As they walk the streets of the borough’s vibrant, picturesque central business district, it would be easy for the Zukins to make like a pair of Donald Trumps, pointing out conquests and potential deals in terms of “got it … got it … want it.”
Truth is, you’re unlikely to ever witness them taking stock of the considerable holdings that surround them. Decorum dictates that it’s something they simply do not do. Flaunting the exact number would potentially lead to satisfaction—“a disease,” Stan calls it. And that could inspire laziness—something neither Zukin seems intimately familiar with.
Stan was the first developer to roll the dice on rejuvenating downtown West Chester’s restaurant scene. He now rents space to many of the jewels in its culinary crown, including Baxter’s, Doc Magrogan’s Oyster House, Pietro’s Prime and Kooma. Anyone looking for an apartment for their West Chester University-bound offspring will likely see a few Zukin properties along the way. And in a few years, if all goes well in their dealings with West Chester Borough Council and nearby residents, the Zukins will be at least partly responsible for the first overnight lodgings downtown in nearly half a century.
Some see the Zukins as visionaries who sparked West Chester’s modern-day renaissance. To others, they embody the ruination of its small-town character. Either way, you can’t argue with success.
Now 68, Stan rolled into West Chester in 1962 from the Logan section of Northeast Philadelphia as a 22-year-old pharmacist. He bought the smallest drugstore in town and, from day one, demonstrated a work ethic that would be a harbinger of greater things to come. The post-World War II rush from cities to the suburbs had been underway for the better part of a decade, and central shopping districts across the country were beginning to feel the pinch of their competitors in the strip malls popping up to serve the auto-obsessed masses.
As business declined, Stan saw many of his commercial neighbors give up and close their doors. Instead of following suit, he took note of the absent stores’ inventory and added it to his own. “We had basically a Wawa in a drugstore,” Stan says. “Then we put in hardware; we put in a large card department. Anything that would sell, we’d carry. So we were basically a general store.”
He also went up against remaining competitors by staying open 11 hours a day—including Sundays, a business tactic all but unheard of in the 1960s. “I didn’t see anything wrong with the town except that the merchants didn’t work long enough or hard enough,” Stan recalls. “And when they had more competition, they decided to close earlier instead of later.”
