NewCanaanite.com (https://newcanaanite.com/tag/new-balance-new-canaan)
A longtime athletic shoe store on Main Street with a history of deep community involvement has closed its doors. New Balance New Canaan, known for partnering with local parents and organizations to build support for special needs kids and their families, closed May 1. One sign in the window at 128 Main St. says “Officially closed” while another directs customers to locations in South Windsor and Avon. The shop is empty.
Here’s a statistic that Ron Rosenfeld rolls out as knowingly and assured as he could recommend the exact right New Balance model running shoe for you: There are 500 families in New Canaan with special needs kids. He knows that because, in the 10 years he’s owned and operated New Balance New Canaan on Main Street with his wife, Tina, Rosenfeld has gone out of his way to serve those families and earned their love and trust as a result.
At one point early on with the store, Rosenfeld said he noticed that many of his customers, moms, would buy shoes for their kids, leave and then come back. “I would say, ‘Why don’t you bring your kid in?’ ” the Ridgefield resident recalled Wednesday morning from a narrow corridor behind the sales floor that serves as his office. “And they would say, ‘He’s a special needs kid and he can be disruptive and a lot of retailers don’t want them in the store.’ And I said ‘that’s not us. You bring them in and if I have to make special appointments, I’ll do that.
Although summer is viewed by many New Canaanites as a time of relaxation, the local running community never stops. Club Connecticut will host the 33rd annual Four on the Fourth road race this Saturday at 9 a.m. starting at St. Mark’s Church. The four-mile race travels up Oenoke Ridge Road and onto West Road, continuing down West for a good stretch before turning around and heading right back to the church, and it usually has a few hundred participants, organizers say. “The Four on the Fourth, the last couple of years has [had] a couple hundred [participants],” race director Jim Gerweck told the New Canaanite.
This event is a one-mile race for men, women, and children (separate races). All proceeds go to scholarships for New Canaan High School students. Runners are asked to register at:
http://newcanaanmile.com/Run.php
The New Canaan Mile was started in 2012 by New Balance owners Ron and Tina Rosenfeld to reward two student athletes at the New Canaan High School for the following merits:
Strong Leadership Qualities
Hard Working
Good Grades
Most importantly the schloarship is not awarded to the students who are necessarily the best athletes, but the individuals that come to practice with a positive attitude and helps others. We give a $1000 scholarship to a person decided on by the coaches.
Sara and David Koch had lived in New Canaan since 2000—starting a family and raising four kids here—when, two years ago last fall, they began discussing an idea for a new type of gym with friend and fellow town resident Rich Fedeli. The industry had seen a trend toward boutique fitness facilities—in fact, Sara Koch had met Fedeli’s wife at a barre studio here—and they saw New Canaanites doing just what they did: traveling out of town to find a single, full-service location. “We all had done different things for fitness since we moved here, either in town or out of town, and the trend that we all saw happening was that people were leaving New Canaan every day to go work out,” Sara recalled on a recent morning from the office at Oxygen Fitness as a steady stream of members moved about the Pine Street entrance just outside her doorway. “So in order to go to a full-service fitness facility, they were going to Equinox in Darien or Intensity in Norwalk. People were traveling all over and there was no great option or place here in town to get a little bit of everything under one roof.”
They spent about 18 months planning the business, finding the 22 Pine St.