In 1977, when Peggy Kleysteuber moved her health food store from Pitt Street to a spot farther west, near King and Payne streets, the strip where she arrived was a treeless no-man’s land.

“This was not Old Town at the time,” she said one recent day. “This [area] was pretty bad. . . . My customers from Old Town wouldn’t come up here.”
    
Old Town extends now from the riverfront to the King Street Metro station roughly 20 blocks away. But as high-end restaurants, boutiques and real-estate agencies have moved in, Kleysteuber’s natural foods store, Cash Grocer, has fallen victim to the success of the area — as well as a boom in the market for organic and natural products, which once were hard to find.[…]