Sunday, April 27, 2008
Stores spill out along Peppers Ferry Road
New River Field Guide
Recent columns
- The Field Guide has led readers on five years of adventures
- New River Deli in Pembroke is still down-home
- Sal's of Radford fame comes to Blacksburg
- Bridge makes a big difference in Heritage Park
Have you noticed that the New River Valley Mall area has been slowly spilling down Peppers Ferry Road?
Probably not, if you only drive back and forth from Blacksburg to Christiansburg.
But the kajillion people who now live on Peppers Ferry Road may have caught a blurry glimpse of this retail creep while zooming past.
It's just across the tracks from the mall. (But don't slow down for those tracks or you'll be rear-ended.) There's been a furniture store out that way for a long time, but the Schewels store that is there really seems like something that would have fit well in an existing shopping center, rather than the edge of town. The mascot pig appears quite perky anyway. There's also the Farm Bureau, a little market called the Little Market and Merchant's garage, which still seems new but has been around quite awhile now.
But the eye-popping thing is a strip mall called Village Square. As Mike Meyers would have pointed out, it's neither shaped like a square nor in a village. It does, however, have a village square-esque over-size clock and a facade suggestive of a villagey assortment of rooflines.
Bookended by Bookbinder's Grill and Mamma Concetta Italian restaurant, it's an assortment of businesses that apparently thought they could do just fine without an anchor store to draw in the crowds.
The restaurants, an insurance agent, a beauty parlor, an architect -- these are the sorts of places that once populated downtowns. Now that the mall area is downtown, they've got to go somewhere, so a strip mall springs up.
With its crazy traffic, this stretch of Peppers Ferry Road seems like a less-than-perfect spot for this type of growth. But what's the alternative? I dread the day when they start building onto the dead end of Peppers Ferry Road into what is still countryside.
Meanwhile, it looks as though the old Department of Motor Vehicles building (next to Schewels) has been torn down. To make way for what? Another Starbucks?
Bottom line: Have developers gone a strip mall too far?
