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Local retail and consignment store The Paint Place has relocated to a new home, outside of Asbury Park.

Jackie Chesley, owner and artisan, closed the store located at 605 Cookman Avenue on Sunday. In March of last year, Chesley [shown above] opened another store in Ocean Grove, where she lives. Operating two stores became “too much,” she said, so she opted to fasten the locks in Asbury Park indefinitely.

Most of the retail items have been moved to her Artisan Home and Design store at 73 Main Street in Ocean Grove. Her photos and paintings now exist in Artifacts in Belmar, where she will also hold a studio space.

Chesley first set up a studio in Asbury Park on Mattison Avenue in 1990 above what is now Taka restaurant and stayed there until the building was condemned, she said.

“The owner was in foreclosure – I didn’t pay rent for a year,” she said. “The roof was leaking on either side and I was in the middle. It was cold.”

After that she rented a studio space in the old gas building at 601 Bangs Ave. until previous owners took over and raised rents about six years ago. After looking at the Cookman Avenue space she found Asbury Park developer Pat Fasano, who she knew owned it, and moved in within a week, she said.

With foot traffic on Cookman on the rise, she decided to add the retail aspect in the front of the space and continue her work in the rear. Having retail also allowed her to broaden her artistic range; she now makes jewelry and silk screened T-shirts, and she forged deeper connections with fellow artists in the city by allowing guest artists to display their work in an area dedicated to changing exhibits.

After 24 years and several locations, she remembers a much different Asbury Park than the one she is moving out of.

“You can’t imagine what it was like when I got here,” she said. “Everything was  boarded up, but then everything started getting renovated little by little and then it picked up the pace.”

She hopes the best for her fellow retailers on Cookman Avenue among all of the new bars and restaurants, she said. Although they provide much needed foot traffic in the downtown, patrons usually show up for dinner until much later so the addition of restaurants serving brunch and lunch will help.

“The history of the town over the past 100 years has been retail,” said Chesley, “but retail is tough, these stores are really holding on by their fingernails.”

In Ocean Grove, she’s able to openly display racks on the sidewalk, which she says helps draw people into the store. Doing so in Asbury Park brought code enforcement to her door on several occasions, but that eased up in recent years, she said.

“The town was almost punitive about the things they wouldn’t let you do,” she said. “I don’t know how many times, in the past, code was here.”

Even though she will miss Asbury Park, she is ultimately just happy to stay in the shore area.

“If you are an artisan … it means you are one hour away from New York City, and that is a big deal,” she said. “I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.”

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