Anchor away: Retail veteran coming down

Roses will be demolished this week

Date published: 3/14/2009
BY CATHY JETT

The Roses Department Store building, which has anchored Park & Shop Shopping Center for nearly 27 years, soon will be no more.

The University of Mary Washington's private real-estate foundation began demolishing the 61,000-square-foot building last Monday to make way for student apartments, a parking garage and retail and office space. Two vacant stores next to it will go, too.

Parent company Variety Wholesalers Inc. eventually plans to open another store in this area, preferably in a strip shopping center similar to Park & Shop.

"We want to do everything we can to stay in the market," said Executive Vice President Ken Ramsey "It's been a very good market for us. We hated to leave."

UMW's foundation bought the 21-acre shopping center--which it has renamed Eagle Village--for $18.75 million in 2007. It estimates it will spend $115 million to build the first phase of its mixed-use project, which is expected to open in summer of 2010.

Park & Shop dates back to 1963, when it had its grand opening as Fredericksburg Park and Shop. It was the city's largest shopping center to date, and hostesse handed out orchids shipped in from Hawaii to the first 1,000 women who visited on opening day.

The shopping center's original 13 tenants included Giant Food, Kmart and Peoples Service Drug Store. It added more, including a Montgomery Ward, two years later. That store left in 1980 to anchor the newly opened Spotsylvania Mall, and Roses moved into its vacated 50,000-square-foot building on Aug. 5, 1981.

Thomas B. Banks, vice president of the Henderson, N.C.-based chain, described the company as an "upscale discounter" in an article that ran in The Free Lance-Star. It carried everything from clothing and automotive needs to housewares, sporting goods, furniture, records, stereos and TVs.

The new Fredericksburg store also had a garden center and snack bar.

At the time, there were more than 40 Roses department stores in Virginia. The closest were in Tappahannock and Charlottesville.

Roses remodeled and enlarged the Park & Shop store in 1987 as part of a company-wide effort to update older stores and reach new markets. The chain had just completed a 12-month period in which its stock price increased faster than that of any other Southeastern company. But its customer base was starting to contract as Wal-Mart, a major competitor, expanded with 53 new stores.

Roses began to lose money, closed more than 100 smaller stores and finally filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 1994. The Park & Shop location, which was among the chain's larger stores, remained open.

Roses emerged from Chapter 11 in 1995 and narrowed its focus to target value-conscious, lower-income consumers.

Cathy Jett: 540/374-5407