Walk past 1510 King Street this month and you will see two signs sharing one window. One says Long Dark House, in a typeface that looks like it belongs on the spine of a paperback you'd hide from your mother. The other says Madame Coco Emporium, in gold script that promises chocolate and curated oddities. Both are new to this address. Only one of them is actually new to Alexandria.
If you have lived in Old Town for more than a couple of years, you may recognize that second name from somewhere else entirely, a storefront a few blocks away that no longer exists.
What burned down in 2024
In November 2024, a fire tore through a building at 103 South Saint Asaph Street, just off King Street, and took three women-owned businesses with it: Little Birdies Boutique, Friends to Lovers Bookstore, and Madame Coco Emporium. The building was condemned. Owner Meschelle Armstrong had built her shop as part of what she called a consortium of women-owned stores sharing one roof, and she watched that plan go up in smoke, literally. "My intention here was to create a women-owned consortium of businesses, where people could come and support all of us in one building," she told WTOP at the time. "So that this happened is just really devastating."
Armstrong did not close. By early 2025 she had opened a new concept called The Parlour, a coffee-and-cocktails lounge that kept Madame Coco chocolate on the menu even as the retail shop itself waited for a permanent home. That home turned out to be 1510 King Street, and this September, just under two years after the fire, Madame Coco Emporium reopened as a full shop again, this time sharing space with a bookstore that did not exist when the fire happened.
One address, two stories that fit together
Long Dark House is the work of Chanthal Harris, who has lived in Alexandria for about five years and spent the summer building anticipation for the store through a run of pop-ups around town, including a witchy soiree at Hummingbird Bar and Kitchen and a tarot-and-cocktails night built around a fictional coastal town she invented herself. The store centers on horror, science fiction, and what Harris calls strange stories, with author events, book clubs, and a cafe component planned. It shares its physical space with Armstrong's chocolates, and its creative DNA runs through Harris's other venture, Hemlock and Hearth, a Southern Gothic fragrance brand she launched in late 2025.
"Independent bookstores are about more than selling books," Harris said when the opening was announced. "They're places where people find community, discover new voices, and connect through stories."
That is a nice sentiment on its own. It also happens to describe something specific and measurable about how retail actually survives on this stretch of King Street.
Old Town doesn't do general bookstores anymore
Here is the pattern, and it is not a coincidence. Alexandria's independent bookstore scene has quietly stopped competing on breadth and started competing on identity. As Alexandria Living Magazine put it when Long Dark House was announced, the city's booksellers increasingly read like a map of passions, with romance carved out in one storefront, Black art and history in another, well-loved secondhand finds in a third, and now, arriving with the fall, horror and the speculative on King Street. Long Dark House is not trying to be everything to everyone within walking distance of the waterfront. It is betting that a shop built around one devoted readership can do something a shelf of everything cannot.
Old Town Books, at 130 South Royal Street, is the store that arguably started this logic locally. Founder Ally Kirkpatrick opened it in November 2018 and built a team of sixteen around a bookstore that leans hard into community events and a distinct personality rather than trying to stock one of everything. When Kirkpatrick wanted to extend that same instinct beyond books, she did not open a second general bookstore. She started an ice cream company.
Fabled Ice Cream sells small batch pints through weekly Friday drops inside Old Town Books, from noon to seven, with flavors named for the stories that inspired them: a brown butter Wuthering Bites studded with Heath toffee, an Earl Grey and lavender Jane Eyre Grey, a spirulina-blue Wilbur's Blue Ribbon built as a nod to Charlotte's Web. It is a genuinely narrow idea, ice cream that only makes sense if you already love the bookstore it lives inside.
Here is the detail that surprises people who assume Fabled is angling for its own storefront somewhere on King Street or the waterfront. It isn't. Kirkpatrick's first permanent scoop shop is going into the Hollin Hall Shopping Center on Fort Hunt Road, not Old Town, because that is where she grew up and where she wants the brand to become, in her words, the kind of place woven into people's lives. Even the ice cream needed to pick a lane, and in this case the lane led out of the neighborhood that made it possible. The pints will keep showing up at Old Town Books on Fridays regardless. The brand's future address is somewhere else entirely.
Put the two stories next to each other and the shape becomes clear. A chocolate shop that lost its building to fire did not disappear, it waited two years and rejoined the block with a sharper, stranger neighbor. A bookstore that wanted to expand did not open a second bookstore, it built something narrower and let that new thing eventually claim its own separate neighborhood. Specialization is not a marketing trend here. It is closer to the operating manual for staying open.
What's stacking up on the calendar this month
None of this happens in isolation from the rest of Old Town's September. If you already live here, the next few weeks give you several reasons to be out on foot after work rather than driving somewhere else for the evening.
- Literary Libations, a free monthly book club with themed cocktails, meets at Morrison House on September 23.
- The Alexandria Old Town Art Festival takes over John Carlyle Square Park on September 26 and 27, with juried work across every medium.
- Alexandria Colonial Tours still runs its lantern-led Ghost and Graveyard Tour out of Ramsay House at 221 King Street, and has added a River Route Ghost and Pirate Tour along the waterfront this season, while Nightly Spirits leads a separate circuit built around Old Town's historic pubs.
None of these are new institutions. What is new is that they now sit a short walk from two storefronts that did not exist a year ago, which means the version of an Old Town evening available to residents this fall is genuinely larger than it was last fall, not just rearranged.
The block, still standing
There is a version of this story that treats Long Dark House as one more quirky shop to add to a list. That undersells what actually happened. A business that lost everything to a fire found its way back to King Street inside a storefront built by someone betting that a narrow, specific identity beats a broad one, and that bet is the same one that already worked for the bookstore two blocks away and the ice cream brand it spawned. Old Town's retail keeps proving a fairly specific point about itself: the shops that last here are not the ones trying to please everyone who walks by. They are the ones that decided exactly who they are for, and then built a signal loud enough for that person to find them.
If you already call Old Town home and you are the kind of person who wants to understand not just what opened this month but why it opened here and why it is likely to stick around, that instinct is worth trusting. It is the same instinct we bring to reading this market for clients, whether the question is a new storefront on King Street or a home on a block you have watched for years. If a conversation about your own Old Town property, now or down the road, would be useful, the team at Patterson Real Estate Group is always glad to talk through what the neighborhood is actually telling us.
