Alia Sachedina, left, took over the boutique shop Adorned, 5 E. Seventh St., her mother, Elizabeth Kurata, started 25 years ago. It used to be called African Adorned, one of the changes Sachedina has made.

Everyone knows that Massachusetts Street is where the action is in downtown Lawrence. I’ve got the parking tickets, the zombie photos and a headache from all the hemp honking to prove it. But there are retailers that figure out how to exist just off of Massachusetts Street as well, and one of them has hit the rare feat of reaching its 30th anniversary.

Adorned Boutique, the shop at 5 E. Seventh St. that specializes in ethnic jewelry and hand crafts, is celebrating its 30th anniversary this month. Is Adorned the longest running retailer — not bar or restaurant — on a downtown side street? I don’t know. I’ve been too busy collating my parking tickets to do the exhaustive research. But the store has to rank high on the list.

For many years the store was named African Adorned, but the store has always been run by the same family.

“My mother was a young traveler and ended up in Nairobi, Kenya,” store owner Alia Sachedina said of her mother, Elizabeth Kurata. “She lived there for 10 years.”

But then she came back to Lawrence, where she previously had lived. And she returned with quite a few items that were made by locals from African villages.

“She started peddling them out of her car and from store to store,” Sachedina said.

From there, the venture became a brick and mortar store, then added a wholesale operation that sold imported goods to other stores across the country. That wholesale business has since closed, and the store changed its named in 2007 to better reflect that it no longer just focused on African goods.

The store carries items from Nepal, Bali, India, Thailand, Mexico, Niger, Mali and others, while also still carrying items from some of the same markets in Nairobi that got the business started.

“I would attribute the success of the business to the kind of collection that we have from all over the world,” Sachedina said. “We know how to find items of very high quality craftsmanship. We’ve worked very hard over the years to develop those relationships.”

For years, the business has best been known for its collection of silver jewelry and semi-precious stones. That’s still a large part of the store, Sachedina said, but the shop also has large lines of textiles, handbags, accessories and other hand-crafted items.

The Lawrence location is the only one for Adorned, and thus far the store has been only a bricks-and-mortar operation. But Sachedina said work is underway to develop a website that will allow the store to begin conducting e-commerce and expand the business’ reach.

“We already get a lot of folks who have lived in Lawrence but moved to other places but they still want to shop with us,” Sachedina said. “They tell us they prefer our shop to the shops in larger cities. That makes us feel really good.”

In other news and notes from around town:

• I reported yesterday on several large projects that have helped Lawrence set a new building record in 2015, and has the city on pace to top $200 million in new construction for the first time. There are also several smaller projects underway or recently completed worthy of an update. Here’s a look at a few, and on some of these I’ll work to get additional information for a more complete update in the near future.

• Back in May I reported that a new indoor family fun center — complete with laser tag and a video arcade — was set to open in July in the former Family Dollar space in The Malls Shopping Center at 23rd and Louisiana streets. Well, July came and went, the center was not open, and I resorted to wielding my laser pointer on unsuspecting pedestrians in the shopping center. But fear not, my laser pointer has somehow become broken, and there are signs that the fun center is indeed still moving forward. The business has been issued a commercial building permit. No word yet on when the business may open.

• Construction work was underway at the Walgreens at 23rd and Louisiana. You may have noticed what looked like the construction of an exam room, but that’s not a sign that the drugstore is adding a medical clinic similar to what Walgreens has at its west Lawrence store or what CVS has at its 23rd and Iowa store. Instead, Walgreen added a small clinical room to provide some privacy for flu shot, immunizations and other such services the store offers. One item to note, though, with the 23rd Street Walgreens is that there has been a change in hours for the store. The location is no longer open 24 hours but rather is open from 7 a.m. to midnight.

• We reported this summer that Lawrence-based Pennington & Company — a large fundraising company for fraternities, sororities and and other nonprofits across the country — was expanding into a new office building at 501 Gateway Drive. That project is moving forward. The company received a building permit for $75,000 worth of renovation work to convert the building into new offices. We previously reported the company is getting the new office space to accommodate employee growth. The company was expected to have 80 employees this year, up from about 45 five years ago.

• A building permit has been issued for a unique office building in west Lawrence. A permit for about $670,000 worth of construction has been issued for the site at 4205 W. Sixth St. That is property that is across the street and a bit west of the Sixth Street Hy-Vee shopping center. Planning documents label the project the Summer Tree Office building. What caught my eye about it, though, is that it using a concept in west Lawrence that has become popular in downtown. The building will have a second story, and will include three living units above the office space. I’ll do some more checking on this one and see if the units are being marketed as work-live type of spaces or some other sort of concept.