Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 24, 1990 TAG: 9006220245
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CATHRYN McCUE NEW RIVER VALLEY BUREAU
DATELINE: CHRISTIANSBURG LENGTH: Medium
Now, one shopkeeper at the still-incomplete Market Place shopping center at the crossroads of U.S. 460 and Virginia 114, calls it "a dump."
Whole sections of the facade are bare concrete. Wood trim on the outside walkways is unfinished. An entire wing is still just steel beams and concrete, and most of the land surrounding the center is red dirt.
BD&E, the Nashville development company of Market Place, is plagued with unpaid contractors' bills and lawsuits involving the Christiansburg center and three others in Roanoke and Lynchburg.
"I would really like to see them finish the exterior of this mall," said Goody's manager Daneta Smith. "It looks terrible. Driving by from 460, it looks like a dump."
But looks aren't everything. The problems are more than aesthetic, according to several merchants at the shopping center.
Last month, an entire section of windows, steel frame and all, in Goody's foyer blew out during a windstorm while customers were shopping inside.
"We were so lucky. It could have killed somebody," Smith said. The window wasn't properly installed, she said, and there were gaps between the glass and the steel frames.
At Barewood Furniture, in an adjacent wing of the shopping center, manager Tabitha Helm has stuffed rags into the windows over the door to keep out the wind and rain.
And without wiring in the ceiling over the outdoor walkway - promised by the developer long ago, Helm said - merchants can't put up signs to let shoppers know where their stores are located.
Leaky roofs, lack of stair railings and outside lights, a sprinkler system that didn't work, door latches that don't close properly - these are among the complaints of many merchants who moved to the Market Place, hoping to cash in on the retailing boom at Montgomery County's crossroads.
Almost all the smaller merchants encountered several months' delay moving into their stores, causing some to lose business and others to back out altogether. It is a pattern that appears to prevail at other BD&E centers.
Marla Straw, co-owner of Chantilly Lace, a bridal boutique - decided to open her shop in downtown Blacksburg after waiting for three months to get into a planned store at the Market Place.
She had ordered a shop full of merchandise. Without a place to sell it, "we probably would have been out of business before we had a chance to ever be in business," Straw said, if she had continued to wait for an outlet in the new center.Much of the 280,000-square-foot center remains vacant more than two years after construction crews broke ground at Virginia Tech's former horticulture farm.
When BD&E bought the land in 1987, the site had been the focus of Tech's controversial "land swap," in which the university traded 257 acres along U.S. 460 for 1,679 acres of agricultural land bordering the New River.
But BD&E bought its shopping center site - about 33 acres of the former farm - for much more than it had been appraised for prior to the land swap.
The company began construction in March 1988 with a projected completion date sometime in 1989. The center was supposed to feature four anchor stores and about 30 smaller stores. Currently, three anchors - Wal-Mart, Goody's and Brendle's - and five smaller shops lease space.
One of the small shops wants to leave.
Country Elegance manager Rebekah Fariss is locked into a three-year lease at the Market Place, with 2 1/2 years to go - and she wants out. The store sells country crafts and home decorations.
By agreement with the landlord, Fariss is temporarily paying 5 percent of her sales as rent to make up for the six-month delay moving in. Sales are so slow, however, she said it works out to less than half of the $12 per-square-foot price in her lease.
"Oh Lord, I wish we'd never gotten in here," she said.
by CNB