The Courier-Journal - March 5, 2002
The Jeffersontown Shopping Center, a Taylorsville Road landmark that has fallen on hard times, is about to see major change.
Hagan Seay Properties announced yesterday that it plans a $6 million renovation of the 43-year-old center, to include demolition of six older buildings and construction of four structures closer to the Taylorsville Rod frontage.
Ron McGehee, a developer with Hagan Seay, said the refurbished center will house a CVS Pharmacy and possibly a bank or a restaurant, along with increased retail and office space.
He said his company is looking for retailers who need low rent, large showrooms and significant storage space – home-improvement companies, perhaps, selling such merchandise as windows, carpeting, lighting, or blinds.
“We want to provide J’town consumers with a variety of quality retail shops, as well as opportunities for expanded medical, office, and other commercial space” McGehee said.
Jeffersontown Major Clay Foreman and the city’s economic-development director, John Cosby, have worked with Hagan Seay and the center’s owner – New Plan Excel Realty Trust, of New York – to launch the reconstruction project.
Foreman said, “If you’ve driven past the center in the past five to eight years, you’ll know it has been in rapid decline. It’s been the target of graffiti artists, and it has seen some deferred maintenance.”
The center has lost Target and Winn-Dixie stores in recent years, along with the four-theater J-Town Cinemas complex.
Since it was built in 1959, as Jeffersontown’s first shopping center, Foreman said, it has been home to several groceries, a W.T. Grant’s store, a popular restaurant called the Ranch House that offered curb service, and an arcade that featured slot-car races that would pack the place on weekends.
McGehee said the renovation will boost the center’s floor space to 201,000 square feet from 187,000. His company – which has restored such other aging shopping centers as Shelbyville Road Plaza – will completely make over the center’s main building, giving it a new façade.
The old cinema will be torn down, along with five other structures, to make way for a 10,055-square-foot building for the CVS drugstore and others along Taylorsville Road.
A building of unspecified size, intended for a bank or restaurant, will be available for lease or built to suit for the tenant, McGehee said.
He said two additional buildings will have 15,000 square feet. The parking lot will be rebuilt, with new signs and landscaping. The renovation is expected to take three to five years.