Photograph by Carrie Marie Burr
Fifty-five years ago Tad and Linda Sturgis’s Adirondack Store was featured in the winter issue of Adirondack Life. By then, the couple’s emporium had been thriving for more than a decade. What first started as a Saranac Lake–based mail-order business had morphed into a showroom in Saranac Lake and, later, a log cabin in Ray Brook. In the very beginning the hot seller was the “Adirondack Firefork,” an iron-and-hardwood tool crafted by an artisan in Minerva. The Sturgises sold thousands. From there, inventory expanded to anything that “relates to the Adirondacks, the out-of-doors, campers, sportsmen, nature-lovers,” according to the article.
Today, that’s still the case. Inside the Adirondack Store & Gallery, the flagship boutique now along Route 86 in Lake Placid, you’ll find glassware, taxidermy, flannel shirts, furniture, rugs, chandeliers and more exhibited room after room, in antique hutches, along walls and dangling from ceilings. You can expect the same at the Adirondack Store in Tupper Lake, though the building’s soaring tin ceilings are just as stunning as the merchandise.
Decades after the Sturgises mailed out the first Adirondack Firefork, their brand has expanded in the hands of Christopher English and Stephen Dori Shin, who bought the Lake Placid store in 2016. On English’s desk is a copy of that 1970 issue of Adirondack Life celebrating Tad and Linda. That the iconic store is again inside the magazine “is wonderful,” says English. “We’re still relevant after all these years.”
English is a longtime Adirondacker. His grandfather Monroe Gladd made his mark in Saranac Lake in the early 20th century, running a variety of businesses, including Nash, Datsun and Lincoln, and Ford car dealerships. Gladd’s eight kids mostly stayed in the area, continuing their dad’s legacy, but English’s mother, Elizabeth, married Charles English, a Paul Smith’s College graduate, and eventually settled in Connecticut. Still, summers meant a return to the Adirondacks for English. At the family camp in Franklin Falls, he grew up surrounded by nature and the region’s tight-knit communities. What followed were decades of working in retail sales in Boston, managing department stores like Lord & Taylor and Filene’s, all the while working as an antiques dealer.
In 2009 English and Dori Shin—a retired ballet dancer—bought a house in Rainbow Lake and moved there permanently. Soon after, they opened Antediluvian Antiques & Curiosities, in Lake Placid. A couple of years later, while at a cocktail party, they heard that the Adirondack Store was closing and the property was for sale. The next day they put a contract on it.
“I realized two things,” says English. “That the Adirondack Store is iconic and we need to preserve our traditional businesses for the integrity of this place. I’m not the type of person who wants to see the Adirondacks filled with chain stores.”
English and Dori Shin renovated the building, closing Antediluvian to channel their time and resources into the store. Then, in 2019, confident in the Adirondack Store brand, they leased the old Ginsberg’s Department Store building on the corner of Park Street and Cliff Avenue, in Tupper Lake, leaning into the wave of excitement about the recreational and business possibilities in that lumber town.
The store in Tupper has the same eclectic vibe as the one in Lake Placid, echoing English’s love of vintage, antiques, Americana and Adirondackana—and whimsy. “People shouldn’t take themselves too seriously,” he says. (During the holidays, the showroom’s stuffed foxes and deer heads wear cheerful scarves.)
There’s no one way to decorate an Adirondack home, English explains. “The region’s Great Camps weren’t just filled with Adirondack furniture,” but pieces from their owners’ travels around the world—“whatever people who moved up here brought with them. But the foundation of the Adirondack Store was products from this country, and so we’ll continue to do that.”
English and Dori Shin’s vision is to continue to expand the Adirondack Store beyond the Blue Line—in 2020, despite the pandemic, they opened a branch in New Canaan, Connecticut, that’s been successful.
Next up: food. The Tall Pine coffee bar was first incorporated into the Connecticut store. In spring 2026 a restaurant of the same name will open in the former Masonic Hall next door to the Adirondack Store. English bought the building that had housed The Well Dressed Food Company, gutted it and has been meticulously renovating it. The new space, which will be open for breakfast, lunch and, in summer, evening events, has seating for 45 people and highlights the 1909 building’s original brick walls, tin ceilings and maple floors. “I really wanted to do it right,” says English. “I felt it was important for the community in the long term.”
English’s concern for the health and success of Adirondack towns extends to his employees—he and Dori Shin provide housing to those who need it. In addition to the 10 who work at their Adirondack Stores in Lake Placid and Tupper, they own Lake Placid Comics and Games, on Main Street, and Furniture Weekend, in Ray Brook, which they use as a furniture warehouse and distribution center. The plan is for the 14,000-square-foot building to eventually house other regional retailers.
“It’s so important for our communities to support local businesses—and to pass them to the next generation so they continue to grow,” says English. “We must look to the past to see into the future.”
