With a few pieces of Lexington Avenue property owned by Martha Jefferson Hospital (MJH) ready to hit the market in the next month or two, the desire for a mid-sized Downtown grocery store has been rekindled among Charlottesville residents and city employees.
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Five parcels next to the recently purchased Martha Jefferson Downtown location will go up for sale in the near future. The area was once looked at as a possible site for a downtown grocery store. The city had previously looked at those parcels (411, 415 and 419 Lexington, and a parking lot on High Street) as a possible locale for a grocery store. Aubrey Watts, director of the city’s Office of Economic Development, says he saw a building concept from a developer “some time ago” about how to construct a grocery on Lexington. The five parcels, with a total assessed value of around $2.1 million, will be put on the market in the next 30 to 60 days, according to Ron Cottrell, vice president of planning at MJH.
“I do hope we find a development partner that does have a vision that could create this important site that would bring business, or a use that would be beneficial to the City of Charlottesville and our community,” says Cottrell. He adds that a Downtown grocery store could be “a terrific asset.”
J.P. Williamson, a founding partner with local developer Octagon Partners, agrees. In September, Octagon purchased the MJH Downtown campus, near the Lexington properties, for $6.5 million. Williamson says a grocery store “would be a wonderful addition to Downtown Charlottesville.” While Williamson says that Octagon is “currently focused on the adaptive reuse of the main campus and is not involved with other hospital properties at this time,” he adds that Octagon “may consider future opportunities.”
According to a 2006 market study commissioned by the city, Downtown Charlottesville would benefit from a 20,000- to 30,000-square-foot, upscale, one-stop grocery store located no more than a couple of blocks from the Downtown Mall. Watts says finding a location is crucial for traffic reasons: “One of the real problems is being able to get the turning radius and the loading docks for 18-wheelers.”
“In general, we think there is a market for a grocery store downtown, particularly one that handles good produce and meat,” says Watts. “But it would be a smaller facility, not a large, super grocery store like Kroger or Harris Teeter.”
In September 2009, the Market Street Market—Downtown Charlottesville’s first grocery store in more than a decade—opened on the corner of Fourth and Market streets. The market was one of few stores located near Downtown to remain open during last winter’s monumental snow storms.
Owner Raphael Strumlauf says that a bigger store does not necessarily spell doom for his business. “It would depend on which company it is, and obviously we would have to adjust in some ways,” he says.
However, he does not believe Downtown would be the ideal area for such a store. “I know they have done a lot of studies, but I don’t really think it would work,” says Strumlauf. “It’s not right off I-64 or Route 29. Stores must do such incredibly large volumes that just getting the area around it is not enough.”
The city remains interested in finding a spot for a Downtown grocery store. Watts says the city once considered the Frank IX building, located at the intersection of Monticello Avenue and Second Street SE, but that did not work. For smaller, niche stores like Market Street Market, “we’ve done it,” says Watts. But for a store the size of that once considered for the Martha Jefferson site, Watts says the city is “running out of spaces for something like that.”
