Longtime Brownsville jeweler calling it quits

After 104 years in business, R.L. Lackner Jewelers is closing its doors, due in part to a softening of the high-end jewelry market and a decline in the number of well-heeled shoppers coming across from Mexico to buy luxury goods.

Carolyn Lackner Baird, who owns the store with her daughter, Shannon Ostos, and sister, Pam Burton, said the time just seems right.

“We’re just tired, basically,” she said. “As far as high-end jewelry is concerned, it’s just not selling as much as it did in the past, but we’re still doing OK. We could continue if we wanted to. We just felt that this would be a good opportunity for us to close the doors, before it did get bad.”

Robert Lee Lackner, Ostos’ great-grandfather, opened the first Lackner Jewelers in Brownsville in 1907, with a store at 1110 E. Elizabeth St. downtown. He’d had jewelry businesses in Missouri and Arkansas before coming to the Rio Grande Valley. R.L. Lackner, skilled in the arts of hand engraving and watch repair, moved to South Texas to be near the railroad, its employees and their timepieces — critical to running a railroad.

“He was always working with people from the railroad coming and getting their pocket watches certified and coordinated to keep up with Greenwich Mean Time,” Ostos said. “That’s why he came to the Valley, because the railroad was coming here. They’d heard there was a lot of opportunity here.”

Lackner Jewelers expanded its luxury retail offerings over the decades, while being handed down from generation to generation, but it never abandoned its core business: watch and jewelry repair. Soon, however, that too will be a memory.

“I’m very sad because of the history, but I’m very happy because I’ll be getting out of retail, and retail is getting tougher for everybody,” Baird said.

Lackner Jewelers moved from Elizabeth Street to its current location at 2200 Boca Chica Blvd. more than a dozen years ago due to declining conditions downtown.

“We moved because there was no parking and no one wanted to go downtown anymore, because it had gotten so seedy,” Baird said. “At one time that was the place to be. It’s like the mall is the place to be now. That’s the way downtown was.”

How does a business like Lackner Jewelers survive for so long, with so many others long gone and forgotten?

“We were just lucky — lucky and pretty good retail merchants, I would say,” Baird said. “I had a good teacher. My father was an excellent teacher and his father was a good teacher. I think when you have a family business like this and you grow up in it and learn all aspects of it, you have more of a tendency to be able to keep it going.”

Garish “quitting business” banners now flutter from the eaves of the building, while the shelves and display cases become emptier by the day. Some items have been slashed up to 80 percent. Baird has no specific date in mind for when she’ll actually close the doors for good.

“Whenever I sell everything — sooner rather than later, I hope,” she said.

As for future plans, enjoying life features prominently on Baird’s itinerary — at least for now.

“My husband (Jim) and I are going to travel and enjoy our time off,” she said. “My daughter’s a graduate gemologist, so she may be doing some appraisals and things like that. But we’re not in any hurry to do anything new at the moment. I might. But I don’t know that it would be jewelry. I’ll keep my options open.”