OAKLAND PARK, Fla. — Rachel Rodriguez looks around her store, and emotions surface at the sight of her relatives’ portraits on the walls. They’re a reminder of a legacy that dates back more than 200 years.

Her business, Constantine’s Wood Center, soon will close in Oakland Park.

It’ll conclude a chapter in the long-running story of the family business, whose vibrant history centered on mastering cabinetwork and offering a “craftsman’s headquarters for fine woods.”

The tradition, tracing to New York in the early 1800s, endured with the Oakland Park store, at 1040 E. Oakland Park Blvd. The store lasted as a stable spot for almost 50 years in Broward, but then business waned.

“It’s hard,” Rodriguez says at work on a recent Friday, wiping a tear. “It’s your life.”

Rachel’s husband and business partner, Rodolfo “Rudy” Rodriguez, says the challenges only grew in recent years, particularly during the pandemic. “For two years it’s been rough,” he said. “But we did everything we could to hold on to it.”

Today, the store’s sign still states, “Constantine’s Wood Center, Serving Satisfied Craftsmen For Over Two Centuries.” But now a large banner looms over it, announcing in all capitals, “Store Closing. Everything Must Go!”

Establishing a company

The Oakland Park store sign gives a nod to the company’s long history, noting its first iteration was established in the early 1800s.

A founder was Thomas Constantine, whose family immigrated from England to New York City when he was a child, and then he, as a young adult, went on to become a cabinetmaker, according to a biography about him featured on the U.S. Senate’s website.

“Between 1806 and 1812, Constantine apprenticed with New York City cabinetmaker John Hewitt, and then served as a journeyman in the same shop between 1812 and 1814,” the biography says. “Thomas opened his own cabinet shop in 1815, and in 1817 his firm, T. Constantine & Co., began competing with some of the city’s most notable furniture manufacturers.”

Some of his work would tie into American history: He pitched in with furniture as America recovered from the War of 1812.

On Aug. 24, 1814, during the War of 1812, British troops burned the Capitol and almost all other public buildings in Washington, including the Senate building. America called on Constantine: “In 1818, the U.S. government hired him to provide furnishings for the Senate,” reads an article in The New Yorker.

He received a contract to “provide the House of Representatives Chamber with carpets, wall hangings, lamps, 192 chairs, and 51 tables,” according to the Senate website.

“The following year, Constantine was awarded a contract to furnish the Senate Chamber with 48 mahogany armchairs and desks, as well as other furnishings, lighting, and textiles.”

Constantine’s brother, John, is known to have assisted with the upholstery of the chairs made for both chambers.

The Oakland Park shop has some of the family memorabilia, including portraits, and a receipt of sale from the government, which has line items for 48 desks ($34 each) and chairs ($46 each), eight sofas ($150 each) and five committee room tables ($48 each), among other items. There were only 48 desks and chairs because it was the 1800s and since Alaska and Hawaii didn’t join the union until 1959.

The work was so famous in its time that a box of Constantine’s wood samples also is now owned by the National Museum of American History.

An old black-and-white photo shows the Constantine’s store in the Bronx, with a 1950s Buick parked right outside. “Visit our display room for craft supplies,” reads the sign on the store’s exterior.

The business closed in 2001. The family said at the time that the New York store’s closure may have been hastened by poor access and no adjacent parking and high taxes and the upkeep.

A move to Florida

When Rachel Rodriguez’s father, John Constantine Docherty, moved to South Florida in 1974, he opened J.C. Woodcraft Center on Oakland Park Boulevard in 1975.

Docherty told the South Florida Sun Sentinel in 2001 that the store lost money over the first eight years until he renamed it Constantine’s Wood Center, recognizing the value of the family name and noting that South Florida was teeming with New Yorkers.

He added and then discarded a power tool line, unable to beat the prices of chains such as Home Depot, and added what became a successful line of decorative moldings.

Some of the items neatly arranged on the store shelves have been in their packages for decades, unsold, like a blending stain, still in the envelope marked with their last New York location on Eastchester Road in the Bronx.

Other items fly off the shelves and have been the bread-and-butter as high-end customers seek unique lines and colors for their custom charcuterie boards and cutting boards.

That includes exotic items of Bubinga wood and zebrawood from Africa, purpleheart wood from Dutch Guiana, and India padauk.

There are shelves of basswood sticks, a mainstay for architecture college students who seem to pop in at the same time each year when their midterm 3D models are due.

The shop sometimes has had to rush orders to soothe college students in a panic who proclaimed, “My project is due in two days!”

A South Florida family

Rudy Rodriguez said he’s grateful for what they have had.

He and Rachel met when they were students at Northeast High School in Oakland Park, and when he saw her in the hallway, it was love at first sight.

But he was just a sophomore and she was a junior, so she rebuked his interest.

“I was a class above him so I couldn’t be bothered with him,” she admits.

But Rudy was persistent. A love affair blossomed. Then they had two children while still in school, so Rudy’s relationship with his future father-in-law started off strained, he said.

“I had to earn my father-in-law’s love,” he said. “We didn’t start off on the right foot.”

At age 20, he was finally hired to paint the warehouse floor and he never left, grateful to his father-in-law for teaching him how to run a business and the sales associates who taught him everything he needed to know about wood, including the right way to color match and how to use a table saw.

In 2001, Rachel Rodriguez’s father made the duo his officers, and when he retired, she and her husband took over in September 2012.

Today Rudy Rodriguez is 50 and his wife is 51. The store and its financial success through the years helped them raise three children and buy their starter house, and then the next house.

They knew it was a legacy that mattered.

“I told her dad it wasn’t going to close on my watch,” Rudy Rodriguez said. “I meant it. But we didn’t anticipate the pandemic.”

“My dad has given him his blessing,” Rachel Rodriguez said in assurance. “It’s had its run.”

‘Definitely the quality’

One of Constantine’s loyal customers has been Mike Schneider, owner of Flatface Fingerboards in Andover, Mass. He’s been buying veneer thin wood from them for more than a decade online, from the Constantine’s website.

He uses it to make miniature skateboards, items that are used with fingers instead of feet for tricks and competitions.

“They are one of my best sources for wood,” he said. “Definitely the quality over everything else, that’s the No. 1 (thing) I look for.”

Seth Brody tagged along with his father, who was a customer when the younger Brody was a high school student at Nova High in the 1990s. Brody’s dad repaired furniture and popped in to buy items such as wheels for an end table.

Now Brody lives in Brooklyn, but when he was in South Florida on vacation and saw the closing sign, he had to come by. For old time’s sake.

He bought a veneer pack, packs of 30 wood species that are 3-inch-by-6-inch each, for a planned coffee table.

He fondly remembers the days of purchasing wood when customers could “see the wood, touch the wood.”

Even other businesses give them business.

Kimberly Transtrum, manager at Builders Direct Kitchen, which shares the building as an adjacent storefront, said she is saddened to see the wood shop close.

Because her business is kitchen and bath remodeling, she said they have used Constantine’s over the years for moldings and decorative trims and stains.

She said Builders Direct Kitchen is now in talks with the landlord to take over the wood shop’s space.

“It’s very sad to see a family-run business go out of business after so many years,” she said.

Rudy Rodriguez knows many of the regulars by name.

“I’m going to miss the customers,” he says. It often was, “Hey, John! Hey, Larry! Hey, Bob!”

Facing change

Today, the Rodriguezes say it’s a different experience to run the store, with spiraling overhead and increasing rent and clamps and fasteners and brushes and glues that can be bought online.

Even the luggage locks don’t sell any longer. “We discovered Amazon has everything,” Rachel Rodriguez said.

There are items that lay unwanted, such as decorative ornaments for dressers and furniture.

“We used to not be able to keep these things in stock,” she said. “But now I can’t sell them.”

“There’s not enough sales so not enough capital to buy the products that sell,” she said.

As customers’ habits were changing, the COVID pandemic delivered a crushing blow.

Suppliers who always used a middleman now pivoted to sell to customers directly or through Amazon, said Rudy Rodriguez.

Because of online competitors, customers no longer needed a specialty shop for mainstream items of tools, such as chisels, although the ones sold at Constantine’s are made of steel and have a wood handle.

Rudy Rodriguez said he can’t compete against the plastic furniture made from Ikea and the tools sold in hardware stores that are made in China.

They think the doors will stay open till the end of January as they try to unload their remaining inventory.

Looking ahead

There is sweetness in their memories and their legacy, but there’s also a pang of regret.

Rudy Rodriguez wonders aloud, what if they knew more about marketing? What if they were more tech savvy and knew more about social media? Would that have made any difference?

“I never thought I’d be the one to close the place,” he said.

Rachel Rodriguez stares at the family portraits on the wall.

One of the portraits shows her great-grandfather, Albert Constantine Jr., who at 18 joined his father’s business in 1920, started the Constantine Craft Division and also wrote the book, “Know Your Woods.”

“I think they’d say it was something to be proud of,” she says.

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