In elegant Brooklyn Heights, the neighborhood with the second-highest average household income in the borough, residents have tree-lined streets, landmarked houses, pretty gardens, and good schools – but not many grocery-shopping options.

The problem was felt more keenly just last week when a D’Agostino grocery store on Henry Street suddenly shut its doors for good, after almost 30 years in Brooklyn Heights.

“This area of Brooklyn is really underserved when it comes to grocery shopping,” one D’Agostino shopper, Anne Samachson, of Hicks Street, said. “We have really poor choices here.”

For the 20,000 residents of Brooklyn Heights, it doesn’t help that larger, popular supermarkets are choosing to build stores in other Brooklyn neighborhoods. Whole Foods is expanding into Park Slope, reportedly opening in 2007 and going up against the Park Slope Food Co-op. A Civil War-era warehouse overlooking the Erie Basin in Red Hook will soon be the new home of a Fairway supermarket.

Customers who shopped at the D’Agostino grocery store are left with two nearby alternatives: They can head farther up Henry Street and shop at the Gristedes Megastore below Cadman Towers, or they can switch their allegiance to Key Food on Montague Street. Yesterday, a 64-fluid-ounce carton of Tropicana orange juice sold for $3.39 at Key Food and $3.49 at Gristedes. At Garden of Eden specialty food store on Montague, the same juice was priced at $3.99.

The Henry Street D’Ag wasn’t a fancy-food specialty store in the mold of Balducci’s or Garden of Eden, but former customers such as Ms. Samachson said it was a notch up in service and produce from the typical supermarket experience.

Yesterday, employees inside the red brick, two-story building on the corner of Love Lane and Henry Street were busy gutting out the store before the arrival of the new tenant. A handwritten sign posted on a window thanked customers “for your years of patronage.”

The next occupant of the space will be a CVS drugstore, according to the D’Agostino company. A CVS spokesman, Mike DeAngelis, said there’s no signed agreement with the property owners.

Brooklyn Heights, especially Montague Street near Court Street, is already served by an abundance of drug stores.

The chairman and CEO of D’Agostino Supermarkets Inc., Nicholas D’Agostino Jr., told The New York Sun yesterday in a telephone interview that “not enough people were shopping” at the Henry Street location, although store officials made an “extreme effort to increase sales.” He said the location’s employees would be transferred to other branches. D’Agostino, which opened its first store in 1932 on the Upper East Side, has 18 locations in Manhattan, one remaining in Brooklyn in Park Slope, and two in Westchester.

Part of the problem for the Heights location – the first D’Agostino in Brooklyn – was that the store occupied a building with landmark designation, Mr. D’Agostino said.

That, he said, prevented management from installing a larger sign in front of the entrance. As a result, he said, “A lot of people may not have been aware that we were there.” In addition, the Gristedes up the street may have cut off potential customers coming out of the Clark Street subway station.

Moreover, he said, Henry Street lacks Montague’s steady flow of pedestrian traffic.

“The customers were the nicest and most wonderful people in the world,” Mr. D’Agostino said. “For the most part, it broke our heart to leave.”