Finnigan was excited. After all, T.F. Finnigan’s has been in his family for 95 years and three generations. His grandfather, also named Thomas F. Finnigan, opened it in that location in the heart of downtown (79 Main St.) in 1923. Thomas F. Finnigan Jr. took it over from his father, and Tom — aka Thomas F. Finnigan III — has run it for the last 35 years.

“As a young man I wasn’t interested,” Tom said Thursday. He left home to attend Middlebury College and St. Lawrence University, and worked at “various jobs in the public and private sector” before joining the family trade.

He’s tried selling the store for several years and wanted someone who would maintain the business as well as the building. He was happy to sell it to the Williams brothers, who were born and raised in Saranac Lake, moved to California for college and pursued careers elsewhere before Johnny returned to open Bitters & Bones bar and restaurant at 65 Broadway in 2015. He and Jimmy, who returned home about a month ago, own the tavern with their friend Osita Ezumah.

“It’s going to stay with people who are really motivated about the historic aspects of our village,” Finnigan said.

The cash register still used to ring up purchases at T.F. Finnigan’s was original to the store in 1923. (Enterprise photo — Peter Crowley)

At the store with Finnigan shortly afterward, the brothers said they plan to keep the store going pretty much as is, with the same staff and Tom helping as well.

“We’re going to try to keep T.F. Finnigan’s alive and well for years to come,” said Jimmy, 39.

“We’ve got tremendous respect for what Tom’s family has done, and we want to continue the tradition,” added Johnny, 32.

“I’ve had other opportunities that I wasn’t crazy about, but when they came along I saw their solid commitment to [the community],” Finnigan said. “I said, ‘Yeah, this is it.'”

The brothers and Finnigan declined to state the purchase price.

T.F. Finnigan’s is known among locals as a place to rent a tuxedo or buy a suit, but it sells casual as well as formal men’s clothing. Its prices are high for many locals — Saranac Lake has a median household income of $43,000 compared to $57,600 nationwide, according to the Census Bureau — but Finnigan has said in the past that this is because the clothes are high quality.

He said the store is profitable and that 2017 was its best year ever, both in terms of profit margin and gross sales. He credits that to its mix of regularly updated merchandise as well as its mix of customers: locals, visitors, second home owners and people from around the region.

The store opened at a time when Saranac Lake’s economy was racing as a vacation spot and a place for people to cure from tuberculosis.

“My father told me … there were 17 millionaires in Saranac Lake, so think about what a millionaire in the ’20s was,” Finnigan said. “It was a very wealthy community.”

At the top of the three-story building’s stone facade is the year it was built, 1900. The main floor was originally occupied by a dentist’s office and then a bakery, Bruzzo’s Confectionery, before it became T.F. Finnigan’s. Upstairs are apartments whose balconies become crowded during Winter Carnival parades.

The facade hasn’t really changed over the years, as shown by old photos in a frame inside the store. Inside, the mahogany and cherry woodwork that was custom-made for the original store in 1923 still lines the walls, as well as the changing room tucked discreetly in the corner, the office up a few steps in the back and the cashier’s counter. On that counter sits the original 1923 cash register, which the store still uses. It strikes a ringing chord with every purchase.

“It’s not the best for us, but the customers like it so much we keep it,” Finnigan said. “We go to the expense of all the old-fashioned bookkeeping to get the spreadsheets that I need. So I don’t know what Jimmy and John’s plans are, what to do with it.”

“We were just speaking to the accountant when we were doing the closing,” Johnny said, “and he said, ‘So you guys are going to definitely get a point-of-sale system?’ And we said, ‘Oh, we’d like to,’ and he was kind of nodding, like, ‘So you’re going to …’ ‘Cause this thing goes up to $99.99, and that’s it. You can’t ring up anything more than 100 bucks.”

If, for instance, someone buys a $600 suit, Finnigan said the cashier has to ring up seven separate purchases: one for each $100 increment and another for the tax.

The brothers are busy; they also plan to expand Bitters & Bones into a brewpub, with some help from a $10 million state Downtown Revitalization Inititive grant the governor announced here Aug. 7. They said the tavern is doing well, but that revenue on its own isn’t enough to buy Finnigan’s.

“Johnny and I have been saving for a while, and this is where we’ve chosen to invest our savings,” Jimmy said.

So will Bitters’ customers look more dapper in the future?

“We were talking getting a nice glow going on, and then off to Finnigan’s to outfit your weekend,” Johnny joked.