Walk down Pequot Avenue past the Pequot Yacht Club and you'll pass a low brick building that's been dark for months. For most of a century, it held a market. Before that, before most of us were born, it held something else entirely. Now it's about to become a market again, and the story of how that happens says more about Southport than the store itself ever will.
The building at 327 Pequot Avenue spent 98 years as the Spic & Span Market, a name so woven into Southport's daily errands that most residents never thought to ask when it started. It started in 1928. For more than three decades, it belonged to Greg and Lori Peck, who ran it as a neighborhood fixture for prepared foods and catering. Greg's connection to the store goes back even further: he started working the counter in 1976, still in high school. Next door, under the same roof, Driftwood Sandwich Shop covered the same beat for years, sandwiches and quick lunches for people who wanted to eat something before they got back in the car.
Both closed. And now, according to a filing with Fairfield's Plan and Zoning Commission first reported by the Hartford Business Journal, the same building is being rebuilt from the inside out for two new tenants: Southport General Store and RoseHill Kitchen, a 26-seat restaurant. The ownership group, Southport Village Properties LLC, is controlled by Kerri Miller and Adam Gray, both Southport residents themselves, who bought the 5,818-square-foot building for $2.66 million.
The Same Job, Handed to Someone New
What's notable isn't that a market closed. Small markets close everywhere. What's notable is what's allowed to replace it.
The zoning application filed for 327 Pequot Avenue describes the project in narrow terms: a facade refresh within the Business Design District, with no change of use, no expansion of the building's footprint, and no changes to the site layout. The renderings, produced by interior design firm Stewart-Schafer, show cosmetic work only, plus a mural meant to reflect Southport's own history on the building's exterior. In other words, the new owners aren't asking permission to reinvent the corner. They're asking permission to repaint it.
That's not really a design choice. It's closer to a structural fact of doing business in Southport's historic district, which has sat on the National Register of Historic Places since 1971. A building this size, on this street, in this district, isn't going anywhere and isn't becoming anything unrecognizable. When a business here closes, the next one tends to fill the same shape, doing something adjacent to what came before.
This isn't the first time Pequot Avenue has proven that. A few doors down at 330 Pequot Avenue, a hardware store that had operated on the site since 1926, tracing back to a hardware business that moved there from the harbor near where the Pequot Yacht Club now stands, closed in 2009. In its place, longtime Southport residents Sissy Cargill Biggers and Kelsey Biggers opened Southport Galleries, a fine art gallery, inside the same brick shell, keeping the original tin ceilings and wide-plank floors, as reported by the Connecticut Post at the time. The use changed. The building did not.
A quick side-by-side makes the pattern obvious:
| Address | Then | Now |
|---|---|---|
| 327 Pequot Ave | Spic & Span Market (since 1928) and Driftwood Sandwich Shop | Southport General Store and RoseHill Kitchen, opening fall 2026 |
| 330 Pequot Ave | Village Hardware (since 1926) | Southport Galleries, art gallery |
Two buildings, two closures decades apart, two replacements that kept the scale and character of the original while updating what happens inside.
What's Actually Moving In
Based on the filing and early coverage, here's what residents can expect when the doors open this fall:
- A general store carrying groceries, prepared foods, and the kind of everyday provisions the old market handled
- RoseHill Kitchen, a 26-seat restaurant sharing the space, a smaller footprint than a full-service market alone, suggesting today's operators need a dedicated dining component to make the same square footage work
- A nod to the past built into the future: coverage of the plans has referred to the new concept as including both Rose Hill Kitchen and Driftwood, meaning the sandwich shop's name may live on as part of what replaces it rather than disappearing with the closure
- An exterior mural specifically intended to mark Southport's own history on the building that housed it
That last detail is worth sitting with. The new owners aren't just complying with a design district review. They're choosing to put the neighborhood's own story on the wall of the building that's been quietly telling it for a century already.
The Neighbors Who Never Left
The reason 327 Pequot Avenue's turnover stands out is that most of Southport's commercial spine doesn't turn over at all.
A short walk away, the Horseshoe Tavern, known locally as "The Shoe," has occupied the same Pequot Avenue address since it was a blacksmith and farrier shop in 1916. It became a restaurant in 1934 and has been run by the Fraser family since 1957, now into a fifth generation of the same family behind the bar. Inside the Delamar Southport hotel, Artisan has built a reputation on farm-to-table dishes served in a room that treats its own architecture, a former train station outbuilding, as part of the experience. Sammy's remains, by most accounts, the only pizzeria in the village proper, which in a town this size functions less like competition and more like infrastructure.
Then there's Pequot Library, founded in 1889 and still the organizing force behind the calendar of Southport life: Derby Day, the Garden Stroll, a holiday caroling party, and docent-led walking tours through the historic district each spring, summer, and fall. Down at the water, Perry's Green sits beside the Pequot Yacht Club, still the spot where residents watch sailboats work their way out toward Long Island Sound, much as they have for generations.
None of these places changed hands recently. None of them needed to. Southport's business roster is long-tenured almost by default, which is exactly what makes an actual closure, like Spic & Span's, register as a real event rather than routine turnover. It's rare enough that people notice, and rare enough that what replaces it tends to be treated with unusual care.
Why the Building Outlasts the Business
None of this means Southport is frozen. Ownership changes. Menus change. The name over the door changes, sometimes after nearly a century of staying the same. What doesn't change, at least not on Pequot Avenue, is the shape of the thing itself: a modest commercial building, built to a scale that predates cars, still doing modest commercial work.
That's the real story behind the plywood covering 327 Pequot Avenue right now. It isn't a story about a new restaurant. It's a story about a village that has figured out, through zoning, through habit, through what residents will and won't tolerate losing, how to let its buildings hold onto their jobs even when the people doing the job move on. The mural going up on that facade this fall isn't decoration. It's an acknowledgment that the building already knew its own history before anyone thought to paint it there.
For anyone who's walked this stretch of Pequot Avenue for years, that continuity is worth more than a new sandwich menu ever could be. It's the reason Southport still feels like Southport, even on the one corner where something finally changed.
If you're curious how details like this, historic district rules, small-lot zoning, the pace of turnover on a single block, actually shape what a property can become or is worth in Southport and the surrounding villages, that's precisely the kind of local read Susan Vanech Properties works through with clients every day. Request a confidential valuation and we'll walk you through what we're seeing on the ground, corner by corner.
