Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, September 30, 1995                   TAG: 9509300007
SECTION: BUSINESS                    PAGE: A-6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: JEFF STURGEON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

CHAMBER MOVES IN

The Roanoke Regional Chamber of Commerce moved Friday into a building that could double as a museum of fashion retailing history.

The move means the 1,750-member chamber will gain street-level visibility from its new location, as well as needed space.

Nostalgia - just a short hike up or down the rear steps - came as an extra part of the deal.

The chamber's new home at 210 S. Jefferson St. - which opens Monday - still houses in its basement clothier Irving Saks' living room-size fur vault.

Saks, founder of Smartwear-Irving Saks, was a purveyor of better women's clothing from 1927 until he died in 1972.

Chamber President John Stroud's new corner office is a floor below a dusty former Saks merchandise showroom, still decorated in gaily squiggled blue, green and yellow wallpaper.

Chamber administrative manager Shirley Coleman recalled how clerks at Smartwear-Irving Saks tucked cash and sales slips into a canister, which was shot by a network of pneumatic tubes to a top-floor office, where the multi-tentacled contraption's base unit still sits. Customers received change for their purchases when the canister returned to the sales floor.

Also on the top floor is a fireplace, in a room where Saks kept a bed and lived part time. The store closed around 1975, and other locations, by then under new ownership, also closed within another decade, said former employee Donna Woodson.

Chamber employees spent Friday moving cabinets, telephones and computers into the remodeled lower three floors of the five-story building. Their focus was on setting up offices and tending to the many pending chores, such as posting a sign.

"I hope people feel we're real accessible," said Doug Miller, a finance specialist with the Blue Ridge Small Business Development Center, an arm of the chamber.

The entrance is off a landscaped plaza facing Kirk Avenue. Charter Federal Savings Bank, which sold the building to the chamber, will lease back the streetside offices fronting Jefferson. The rear half of the first floor is devoted to the chamber's 75-person meeting room.

The small-business center and an international trade adviser from the state Economic Development Department will occupy the second floor, and main chamber offices are on the third floor.

The chamber paid $365,000 for the property. Renovations brought the project's cost to $615,000, Stroud said. Chamber officials found that for what they were paying for their former location in the Crestar Building on First Street, the organization could own a building with more usable space.

The chamber needs $100,000 for a fire escape before it can use the top two floors.