In Detroit’s fragile business climate, things can change in the blink of an eye.

Cheryl West learned that first hand. A few months back, West, 61, was operating her music-themed store – the Westminster Consort Music Room – which had been open on the ground floor of the New Center’s Fisher Building for three years. Now, the store is gone and she finds herself alone.

The store sold an odd collection of novelty items whose only connection was some relation to music – mugs with musical phrases on them, plastic busts of famous composers, T-shirts with quaint slogans, and other hard-to-classify items like toilet paper with musical notes on it. They also had reeds, rosin, mouthpieces, tuners, and oils for musicians playing at the Fisher. “People keep saying that it’s an entirely new concept, that they so love the store,” she said in December.

West spent a life immersed in music. Her father, Walter West, was a locally renowned music teacher whose students included eventual Motown songwriters Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier and Edward Holland, as well as future orchestral musicians, composers, choir masters.

“I remember as a little girl all of these wonderful people that I had no clue what they were going to come to, people who ultimately became very famous coming to the house to study with Dad or work on a concert or whatever,” West says. “So I just grew up with that.” She still lives in the large family home just outside the Boston-Edison neighborhood on the west side.

She’s a flutist, a member of the flute performance ensemble Westminster Consort, which began more than two decades ago and which she named her store after. Occasionally they’d perform an intimate recital there. She’s also an adjunct professor of flute in Marygrove College’s Institute of Music and Dance.

“I realized that so many of the things that I needed either as a performer, or wanting to give presents to my colleagues or friends, I would always have to hunt them down, go through mail order, and wait and pray that it would come in good condition. So it popped in my head, why don’t I open a shop with these things?”

She ran the store with her older sister, Sandra. “My sister, I consider she’s part of me,” she said last year. “She helps me tremendously.” Sandra handled the books, Cheryl handled the retail. Both were unmarried. Their parents had died long ago; their brother passed away in June. “We’re getting down to a precious few,” she said then, “but were trying to hold on and keep good things alive, keep hope alive and keep things moving along in a positive vein.”

The store’s customers were orchestra performers, Fisher Theater audience members and classical music enthusiasts, a narrow customer base. Despite her enthusiasm, she admitted that the store struggled. “We are suffering, I will be quite honest with you,” she said just before Christmas. “We are suffering big time. You would think this would be a very enlivened area; it is not, partly because of the Michigan economy and because they keep pulling music out of the schools, which I still can’t understand.” Some days, she said, she didn’t get a single customer.

As winter took hold, everything fell apart. The sister she was inseparable from died suddenly in February, something she discovered when she went to visit her after phone calls to her went unreturned. “I was praying all the way there that God would hold me up, because I knew what I would find there,” she says.

Soon after the funeral she closed the store, the abysmal sales and loneliness taking their toll. Her previously cheerful demeanor was faded.

“People would not believe what goes on in that building,” she says now of the Fisher Building. In her three years there she was robbed six times and endured countless shoplifters, she says.

“Not only that, but the mental patients roam through there at will, they run through there screaming, cursing, from any number of group homes in the area. One actively lunged at me, and he was on a routine cycle, he would come back every Saturday at 1:30. He was always harassing me. Security is an absolute joke there and there was no security presence down that hallway. I’m so glad I’m out of there.” Fisher Building representatives could not be reached for comment.

West isn’t sure what the future holds. She might rent out rooms in her sister’s house for recitals, small chamber music concerts, maybe open a smaller version of the old store there. For now she’s only trying to make life normal again. But as it stands, the city lost another little business, the kind that make a city interesting.

“We tried to tough it out, but to no avail,” she says. “I guess it was not to be.”