Deck’s Hardware, our local hometown hardware store, is a family owned business successfully serving Ambler and surrounding communities since 1908.
“To be a good neighbor, you need to be neighborly.”
–Tim Deck of Deck’s Hardware in Ambler, PA
My adopted hometown is a time capsule of sorts. It feels kind of like the 1950s, but with internet access.
We’re a mill town, a little like the one my Mom grew up in in Massachusetts. The commodity here wasn’t Quebcois (French Canadian) and Irish immigrant labor and textiles. Rather, it was asbestos and the drawing out of the young and able from a town called Maida (my-dah), Italy. My neighbors speak Italian like they just stepped off the boat, as some of them were born in Maida.
The mills are gone, but the mill owner’s castle–legit, actual castle. It stands tall as do the workers’ row homes near the mill sites and train tracks. Some are utterly glorious neogothic stone-walled homes, complete with grotesques, tower a little further up the valley.
The middle class homes, in which we find ourselves, dot the landscape. There are 8 executives’ mansions that are ground-poundingly Queen Anne-turreted and spired testaments to design and craftsmanship. Made from locally quarried stone with roof systems so complex in the 1890s, they push the limits of the trigonometry and hand saws that figgered ‘em and put them together. The 7,000-square-foot homes line the terrace adjacent to the castle grounds.
Our small town is still a bustling haven of commerce and fun, just in a new way.
The Main Street has evolved of course. Gone is the department store, bandstand, hotel, and many of the corner markets. Those buildings now have coffee shops, insurance agents, BBQ, and sushi. There’s a playhouse, an improv club, and a movie theater, too. Our less-than-1-square-mile town also has its own symphony. Many of the current town businesses were born in this century.
But there’s one hold-over from the old town: Deck’s Hardware.
Sure, there are cars in the parking lot, but you can–if you squint and imagine just a little–easily see the days of horse-drawn carts clopping up from the train tracks just down the hill on dirt roads bringing to the exactly like they were in 1908 shelves and boxes throughout this amazingly charming, useful corner of the world.
What’s special about our more-than-century-old hometown hardware store?
If you think my town is a time capsule, Deck’s is the time capsule’s time capsule. Its history–and the kind, helpful words of the people who work there–is everywhere you look.
An example is the back door where Jack is smiling. Yes, it’s a back door. And, yes, gravel and concrete are stored back there, but that was the stable in 1908 when Deck’s opened. Imagine a horse’s head sticking out of that Dutch door.
Inside, it’s a maze of rooms and floors, all loaded with inventory and tales to tell. Signs like the one that says “Tinsmithing” is upstairs in their metal working shop, just flights of stairs away from everyday customers.
It’s also a True Value Hardware Store, and they “will make every effort and we take pride in tracking down hard to find items that you are looking for.”
What do we love about Deck’s Hardware in Ambler, PA?
Deck’s is also imbued with the beauty and craft and meat and potatoes utility of eras gone by.
The corbeled bench is buried in a room in the back, a home to torch gas and the makers’ marks of a century of shopkeeping to show its age, its provenance. They made things like this back then because beauty and craft mattered. It still does. (Makes me dislike the skeuomorph “system processing” fake lady yelling fake politeness just a little more than I already do.)
If you notice the door, it’s two layers of 2×12 cross-laminated and bolted together with square-head bolts. It’s a beast. You try to punch a hole in that and you’re going to need a new hand.
Just look at the radiator cover. It’s ancient. It works. And it’s built with beauty for the beholder.
What’s inside Deck’s Hardware in Ambler?
Downstairs, and the end of the room where hand trucks and stuff are stored is another room. And in that abandoned space for which the history is unclear, its dirt floor holds the kegs nails used to come in. It’s just sitting there, waiting for Father Time as is the phone on the wall upstairs by the front door.
Back in front of the hub of the store, the sales counter and registers–unless you know this store like the back of your hand, and nobody does, the first thing you do is talk to a real person. Lots of “Hi Mark” when I go in and “How may I help you” flying across the room. You just know that’s how the store works when you walk in.
Then they politely ask you what you need and help you solve your problems. Grass seed. Door knob. New window screen. Lawnmower. Kitchen stuff. Alarm clocks. Snow shovels. A safe. The nuts and bolts of customer service when you’re looking for nuts and bolts. And I get my circular and miter saw blades sharpened there rather than buy new ones.
They even have an elevator of sorts. Operated by rope, it can hoist merch from the basement storage areas up to the sales floor where you often hear, “Thank you. See ya next time” as Joe Smith heads out the door.
Hardware store errands are some of my favorite father-son times.
Finally, back to Jack, 13, whom I bring in there every week or so even though he grumbles at me for it right now. We “get supplies”. It’s just something we do.
The dad trick I’m playing on him is that as wildly advanced as his world is–flying cars, oh my– horses bringing things up hills just wasn’t that long ago. And personal relationships with the people in your life matter just as much as the heartless efficiency of self-checkout.
Thanks. See ya next time at the local hardware store.
Great store. I hope it’s not true about it’s closing. I’ve lived in Ambler for 45 years and Deck’s has been a lifesaver on many occasions. It’s more than a store. It’s Ambler