Shopping Plaza

Plaza tries to fill in the blanks With crime down in neighborhood, businesses show interest in coming to Avondale-Roxboro area

News and Observer
August 17, 2006
Jim Wise, Staff Writer

Compare Foods, a new grocery store, is going into the old Winn-Dixie space at Kmart Plaza off Avondale Drive. The old Kmart itself, like the Carmike 7 movie theater, remains empty. But their blank facades make a striking contrast with the Plaza's other side.

There, at a 16-shop strip center, the comings and goings during business hours are constant.

"If somebody vacates, we'll have it leased within a week," said Mark Mulvaney of Harbor Group in Norfolk, which manages the shopping center. "That has become a vibrant retail district."

With more than 30 acres and 234,640 leaseable square feet, the Plaza is the biggest commercial property, but far from the only one, around the intersection of Avondale, Roxboro Street and Club Boulevard. It's a busy district, but it has its troubles.

"Transients and drug dealers are a big problem around here," said Cynthia Grissom, who owns Joy Foods on Roxboro Street. "I was robbed at gunpoint a week ago Monday."

Troubles, yes, but, according to the Durham Police Department's Crime Mapper, there were 125 "crime incidents" within a quarter mile of the Avondale-Roxboro intersection in 2005. Through August, the year 2006 had seen only 19.

Why the decline in crime?

"It's all of us working together," said Michael Shiflett, who lives a few blocks away in the Northgate Park neighborhood, just west of Roxboro Street. "We've got that synergy."

'Problem children'

A drop in crime in the Club-Roxboro-Avondale business district is the apparent result of concerted cooperation throughout the past 18 months or so.

"The surrounding communities got together ... to work with the businesses," said Grissom. "To move the problem children out of the area."

"Problem children" are vagrants, drunks and addicts who leave hypodermic needles on playgrounds, empty beer bottles at storefronts and their own excrement on back stoops and whose very presence turns customers away. They are also the enterprises that cater to them -- selling narcotics and crack pipes, or providing places for undesirable behavior.

"A bar that doesn't have a nameplate on the front, what do you think is going on in there?" said Ken Gasch, an artist who lives and works in the Colonial Village neighborhood, just east of Roxboro Street.

Gasch and his fellow activists have shut down some such establishments: "a nefarious bar, pharmacy, where a mechanic was dumping oil," he said, "and a raging drug house ... [we] cut their stay short, shall we say."

He and a few other area residents are "agents of trespass," meaning they are authorized to act as agents for property owners to declare undesirables unwelcome on properties, to alert police to remove such people and to swear out warrants for trespassers' arrest.

And Gasch and Grissom are board members of the Beaver Pond Area Business Alliance, a group of business owners, police representatives and residents of the Colonial Village, Northgate Park and Duke Park neighborhoods. They formed the group this summer to further clean up the business district -- literally and figuratively -- and to encourage its patronage by area residents.

"So," Gasch said, "all sorts of good things are going on."

Room to rent

Another good thing Gasch mentioned is Compare Foods. Kmart Plaza manager Mulvaney said it will be "an international-type store," opening in October in the space Winn-Dixie left more than a year ago. But empty space at the old Kmart, gone since 2003, and the theater, vacant since 2002, remains worrisome.

"It is a fairly big concern, because it attracts the transients and drug dealers," Grissom said. "Kind of leaving them an open space to play."

This shopping district is not high-end. Mulvaney said the catalyst for the Plaza's strip mall has been a Duke Power payment center. One other business there advertises "Refund loans" and another dress suits for $89.99. The long-established Medical Supply Superstore at Club and Roxboro is moving out, and a pawn shop is moving into its space from across the street.

On other hands, the Mexican bakery gets good reviews, as does King's Red and White food market. A new McDonald's stands down by Interstate 85, and the BP station at Club and Roxboro is due for upfit. The district has the neighborhood feel, or at least potential.

Showtime?

Mulvaney will admit the Kmart Plaza has a problem.

"The center is down in a hole and you can't see it" from I-85, he said, but if he could get permission to remove the trees that screen the center from highway view, he could have a Costco-Target scale of retailer "in there before you knew it.

"We're 200 trees away from being the best location in all of Durham," he said.

He's had interest in the vacant theater, too, he said this week.

"We want to make sure people go in with the right type of use," he said. "We're actually looking at a second-run or cinema cafe-type use."

With seven screening rooms, an operator might devote two to second-run movies, another to classic films, another to a live theater, another to a jazz club and so on.

Here's hoping

Some neighborhood activists said another good thing for the district is the end of I-85 reconstruction.

"It will be a stimulus for business to look at that intersection as a gateway to Durham," said Shiflett, a former president of Durham's Inter Neighborhood Council.

Grissom, the Joy Foods operator, is not so optimistic on that point. "I don't think it's going to have much of an effect," she said: But she does think cleanup efforts are positives, for business and otherwise.

Grissom has lived in the Colonial Village neighborhood for 13 years.

"Thanks to the work of a lot of different people chasing out the crack houses," she said, "my kids can ride their bikes in safety, and comfortably. And that makes a big difference."