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Al and Andy Shuman

There is change we can accept and there is change we don’t want to hear about --and the imminent closing of Trover Shop in the two hundred block of Pennsylvania Avenue Southeast is definitely in the latter category. For fifty years Trover has served the Capitol Hill community as newsstand, bookstore, stationer, toyshop, cigar and candy emporium, and meeting place. The universal reaction when people first hear the news or see the “going out of business” signs in the store’s windows is “oh no!”

No one is more dismayed than Al and Andy Shuman, the two brothers who manage the shop. Their father, Joe Shuman, along with a partner, Harvey Weinstein, founded Trover in 1958. He worked six days a week until five years ago, creating a chain of five D.C. stores. After the closing of the Capitol Hill shop, probably in mid-August, only the downtown location on F Street, NW will remain, managed by the middle Shuman brother, Steve. In the meantime, Al and Andy are winding down operations and, as Al says, “feeling the love” of the neighborhood where they’ve done business for so long. Every day, longtime customers stop in to say how sorry they are to see them leave and how much they will miss Trover’s unique mix of merchandise. “I didn’t expect this part to be so hard,” says Andy.

Sitting in their tiny office behind the children’s books section, he and Al reminisced recently about their years at the store. They grew up there. By ten or eleven years of age they were working the cash register, could add up prices and calculate sales tax in their heads and appreciated the opportunity to swipe the occasional candy bar (but never cigars, they say. Their father smoked but they never did). They remember seeing actor Vincent Price when he came in for a book-signing and getting an autograph from baseball great Ted Williams. Every Sunday for years there were six hundred copies of the New York Times (which did not have home delivery in DC at the time) to be assembled. “Dad didn’t pay us what we would have made somewhere else,” Andy said, “but we felt good about being here.” Al majored in chemical engineering in college, married his high school sweetheart and moved to Southern Texas to work for Dupont. Andy studied electrical engineering. But the lure of the business, of Washington, and of the big, affectionate Shuman family (there are two sisters as well as the boys and parents, Joe and Anne) was great and soon Al and Andy were back in DC, working together.

The original Trover Shop, selling newspapers, books and “sundries,” was on Independence Avenue, part of a block that was razed for construction of the Madison Building of the Library of Congress. In 1977 the business moved to Pennsylvania Avenue and there it became a fixture in the neighborhood. In 1990 it expanded to two locations with cards and stationery in one shop and books and magazines a few steps away in another. In August 2007, the Capital Lounge was gutted by fire and the card shop, which was next door, had to close. (The landlord subsequently sold the building to the Heritage Foundation.) The remaining shop expanded to two levels, adding cards and office supplies to its inventory of books and magazines. The children’s books and toys section was expanded. Large crowds continued to turn out for celebrity book signings – the most by far for Hillary Clinton (she sent the Shuman brothers a thank you note) but also for Colin Powell, Al Gore, Cal Ripken (who “couldn’t have been nicer”), Don and Fred Imus (grumpy, as would be expected), John McCain (he did two readings), and Barbara Walters. Every Speaker of the House since Tip O’Neil came by; Nancy Pelosi was “as nice as could be.” Newsman Chris Matthews wrote thanking them for giving him his very first book signing. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor visited. Congressman John Lewis stopped by regularly to sign copies of his memoir, actor Alan Alda found time to chat. Washington Post sports columnist Tom Boswell’s parents were customers and he did a book signing. Katy Kelly, who grew up a few blocks away, put the shop in one of her Lucy Rose children’s books and attracted a throng of little girls and their moms to her signing.

But the internet was taking a toll. People were ordering books from Amazon and going on-line for the information contained in the bulky congressional directories that were a store specialty. Sunday New York Times sales dropped to 80 or so a week. Even sales of cards and magazines slipped. Across the board, business was off.

A restaurant will soon occupy the space to be vacated by Trover. Employees of the Library of Congress will have more options about where to eat but they will no longer be able to spend their lunch breaks browsing through magazines; young parents will not, as columnist Marguerite Kelly remembers doing, find their way in tears to the parenting department to look for help with their children. Last minute gifts will have to be purchased elsewhere. And Al and Andy Shuman will be missed by the community they served so well.