For residents of a West Footscray neighbourhood, the house on the corner might now be gone, but it will never be forgotten.
Cade Lucas explains why.
Once a fixture of Australian suburbia, corner stores and milk bars are becoming increasingly rare with each closure invoking a mixture of sadness and nostalgia.
However, when a very busy corner store in West Footscray suddenly shut its doors a few weeks before Christmas, the only sadness among neighbours was that it didn’t close earlier. Any nostalgia was reserved for the time before it opened for business.
As you might’ve guessed, the business on the corner of Somerville Road and Lae Street, West Footscray wasn’t your archetypal neighbourhood shop: it didn’t sell lollies (though it products often came in small bags) and rather than closing late at night and on public holidays, it was open at all hours.
In fact the only resemblance 374 Somerville Road had to a traditional corner store was it was located on an intersection.
That’s because ‘the corner store’ was merely the nickname locals gave to the house, which from January 2023 to December 2024, hosted a drug selling business.
And for the near two years it operated, business was very good indeed.
“It seemingly came up over night,” recalled Marcus Wolfe of when he first noticed something going on at the house he had to pass to get to and from his home in nearby Park Avenue.
“It was an empty house one day and the following week it was a bustling shop with a 24-7 clientele.”
Another local resident, Chris Kennett, said trade at the corner store soon became so brisk that it caused traffic congestion.
Like Mr Wolfe, Mr Kennett also lives in Park Avenue so couldn’t help but notice what was going at the house on the corner.
“I reckon at least half the time I came in and out of the street there was an obvious customer entering or leaving,” he said.
Given the new neighbours weren’t exactly running a clandestine operation, what their customers were buying was also pretty obvious.
“By observation of people shooting up and passing out, I’m fairly confident they were selling heroin along with other stuff too, but couldn’t say for sure what,” said Mr Kennett, adding that similar stories soon began filling neighbourhood Whatsapp groups, while petty crime, previously not a problem, suddenly became a concern.
Mr Wolfe said there were other dead giveaways, such as used needles suddenly turning up in the nearby park, McDonald A Reserve, where local children played.
The area around Somerville Road, Lae Street and Park Avenue is a quiet residential pocket in between gentrified Kingsville and industrial Brooklyn, making it an attractive location for young families.
Unsurprisingly, they weren’t enamoured with the new neighbours and their many, many visitors and began alerting the police.
“We’d report things to the police and if it was an urgent matter, it’d be a triple-0 call so the ambulance would come out,” said Mr Kennett, a single parent to two boys aged 13 and 8.
“Otherwise we’d lodge it on Crime Stoppers online as we were encouraged to by police.”
Mr Kennett provided Star Weekly with a list of 25 incidents he and his neighbours had reported to police last year alone, including drug users shooting up in the street, others passed out in parked cars and trucks and an incident on February 3 last year where two men armed with crowbars threatened the owner of the house next door in what’s believed to be a case of mistaken identity.
It wasn’t enough.
“Police said there needed to be a certain weight of evidence to justify a warrant,” said Mr Kennett.
“On the one hand it made sense, but it seemed ridiculous to us that with what we were experiencing every day, that they’d say we needed more (evidence). And what seemed galling was that it was our job to do this, that we had to collect evidence when police knew full well what was happening.”
A spokesperson for Victoria Police said they were aware of a number of complaints made about the Somerville Road property throughout 2023 and 2024 and that action had been taken.
“Police executed a search warrant on April 9, 2024 and allegedly located two imitation firearms and cannabis,” the spokesperson said.
“Officers arrested a 53-year-old Footscray West man. He was charged with handling stolen goods and prohibited person possessing imitation firearm, and was bailed to Werribee Magistrates’ Court on December 3, 2024.”
Police also executed a search warrant at the Somerville Road property on December 20, 2023, where heroin and suboxone strips were allegedly found, but charges were not laid due to insufficient evidence.
Mr Wolfe said he was left frustrated by the inability of police to shut down the corner store, especially given his job as a corrections officer.
“That was one of my biggest fears that one of their clients would be one of my ex-clients from work.“
Ultimately it wasn’t the authorities, but the the occupants themselves who shut down the corner store, packing up and leaving sometime between December 7 and December 13.
The reason for the hasty departure remains unclear, but what is undisputed is that the occupants left with their (dark) sense of humour in tact.
“We were stunned to find that they had left behind a sign which is just as flagrant as their business was,” said Mr Kennett of the ‘Shop is shut’ placard placed out the front of the house as a farewell message to the neighbourhood.
“We sort of marvelled at the cheek of it and the irony that we’d spent so long trying to get this acknowledged and dealt with that there was a shop here and then they admitted it.“
After two months sitting empty, 374 Somerville Road was recently torn down.
Where the corner store once stood is now just an empty block with an excavator sitting in the middle and a cardboard sign attached to the cab.
It reads: “Shop now gone.”
