Home > Gwinnett > Rick Badie / My Opinion > Archives > 2006 > March > 07
Tuesday, March 7, 2006
Strip mall central needs caring leaders
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I thought Lilburn Square was bad.
Gwinnett Station, off car-clogged Pleasant Hill Road in Duluth, might give the square a run for its money. The Station’s saving grace is its brown, bricklike facade. Makes it look sophisticated — from a distance.
Pull in. Look closer.
What we got here is just another bad-looking strip mall.
In August, Kroger bailed for Reynolds Crossing, a spark-ling center off Steve Reynolds Boulevard. Plywood covers up the oval Kroger sign in the Gwinnett Station marquee. Someone paid attention to detail:The plywood fits the oval perfectly.
Now ifonly someone would pay equal attention to the strip mall itself. The bays in the parking lot where Kroger customers returned their shopping carts are still intact. So are a few shopping carts. The interior of some of the vacant suites looks like someone took aim with a sledgehammer.
Supercuts has relocated. Gone, too, are a music store, a tailoring shop, a Mexican restaurant and an interior design business. Gone, I’d imagine, for the same reason as Kroger — for space that’s bigger, brighter and, possibly, in a better location.
Michelle Iordache owns K&S, a tailoring and shoe repair business that relocated from Gwinnett Station to Reynolds Crossing.
“Kroger moved. So I moved,” she told me.
Gwinnett Station is hurting primarily because a big-box retailer (Kroger) jumped ship. Other businesses in the complex followed suit. It’s an exercise of the free market that strip malls in the western part of the county keep falling victim to.
Unfortunately, the people who could help stop the hemorrhaging — chamber officials, developers, investors and our government — are looking farther north and east. They’ve turned a blind eye to troubled commercial areas in Norcross, Duluth, Lilburn and Lawrenceville.
Even if they attended to those areas, we still might have a Gwinnett Station. It wouldn’t linger, though, and there wouldn’t be so many of them around here. If leaders cared, the departure of a big-box retailer wouldn’t necessarily signal doom for any strip mall in the western part of the county.
And if they cared, we wouldn’t need community improvement districts, those associations trying to enhance areas like Gwinnett Place mall and Gwinnett Village, which takes in a larger number of some of the most run-down strip malls in the county.
But the reality of it is that, in Gwinnett, aka strip mall central, they don’t care. So we need community improvement districts. Somebody’s got to step up. Look at our community. Too often, we are left with eyesores such as Gwinnett Station and Lilburn Square.
Dozens of others exist, and readers have helped me compile a list of our county’s dingiest and dirtiest mini-malls. I plan to write about them periodically during the year.
Iordache, the owner of the tailoring and shoe repair business, said she has no regrets about following Kroger’s lead.
“Gwinnett Station looks horrible,” she told me. “I feel so sorry for the people who are still there.”
Me, too.
