Castro’s Back Room is gone but the cigar shop will eventually return next door and the Depot Street building it occupied will be rehabbed into more than a dozen small apartments.
“We had a great 24 years there. We will be recharging it, but not any time soon,” said owner Eric Kilbane, who also owns Castro’s in Manchester and Nashua.
Kilbane owned the four-story building that held Castro’s and Hobbys With a Twist but sold it last year. He owns the building next door, most recently a pizza restaurant, and is in the process of renovating it so he can reopen Castro’s.
The old building will make it easy to keep the classic antique vibe of Castro’s, he said. “We took out the old drop ceiling. The room goes up another 5 feet. The old wooden ceilings are awesome.”
Castro’s former home, a four-story building at 15 Depot St., is now owned by James and Maureen Dagle of Gilford, who own a Massachusetts construction firm.
“I was downtown walking around. I had a taco on the corner there and I saw the ‘for sale’ sign on the building. That’s how we ended up with it,” said James Dagle.
The building is being gutted. Dagle says the plan is to keep two commercial spaces on the ground floor and build 14 small apartments, roughly 700 square feet each, above it. That will return the building to its original purpose, he said, although the top floors have been unused for a long time.
Dagle said the building had 14 separate living areas although they “had more of a rooming-house feel.” They will be upgraded and modernized and an elevator added to what had been a walk-up building.
“It’s a really cool building but no one had been upstairs for, one estimate is 28 years,” Dagle said. “It looked that way, too. There were all the really old appliances, tiny little tiger-claw tubs. It’s like a time capsule but in bad repair.”
He said he talked Concord planners about the building and was told that less-expensive apartments were the greatest need downtown. He hopes to submit plans to the city by this fall.
As for the eventual reopening of Castro’s Back Room, Kilbane said he plans to sell drinks as well as smokes, as he does in his other two New Hampshire outlets.
“Concord never had that. When we opened in 2001 a tobacconist/liquor license wasn’t available. But now it is,” he said.
Despite the lack of drinks, he said business at the Concord Castro’s was roughly equivalent to the one in Nashua, which is twice as large as Concord.
“We met so many good people there we want to stay,” he said. “They have done such a nice job downtown. There are a lot of things going on.”
David Brooks can be reached at dbrooks@cmonitor.com
