The Courier-Journal - March 30, 2000
The Shelbyville Road Plaza shopping center will be reconfigured, expanded and remodeled, according to recently filed changes in developers’ plans.
The plans include razing the Hawley-Cooke Booksellers and Disc Jockey Records stores to make room to enlarge the parking lot and moving them elsewhere in the center.
A partnership called Bowling Plaza LLC wants to realign the center along both sides of a parking lot that would extend from Shelbyville Road to an addition behind the current center.
The developers received final approval in January for an addition with 120,097 square feet of space on 18 acres behind the current center. They now want an addition with 181,789 square feet – an increase of 61,692 square feet.
The Louisville-Jefferson County Planning Commission’s land-use committee will review the change in plans, but no date has been set, said Connie Huber, the commission’s spokeswoman. The new plans will also need approval by the full commission and St. Matthews.
The expansion is larger than originally proposed because additional tenants are interested, said Benton Seay, senior vice president of Hagan Properties, one of the partners.
Work on the addition, as well as the rest of the project, should begin this summer and will probably take three years to complete, he said.
Seay declined to name any new tenants because the project is under application. “Nothing is final as of now.”
He did say that the addition should include five major stores and several smaller shops. One large tenant will be a shoe store, and one will be a “specialty grocery,” according to plan on file at the commission.
Seay said he couldn’t estimate how many small shops will be involved.
If plans work out, the center will include about 345,000 square feet after the expansion is complete.
Converting the store space to a parking lot would help traffic circulate among Shelbyville Road, the current center and the expansion, said R.W. Marshall, whose company owns the center.
“They’ll connect the front to the back,” Marshall said. “It would be a great improvement.”
Bowling Boulevard, immediately east of the center, was to provide primary access to the addition, according to plans submitted in 1996, which have been changed several times.
Daymon Ward, leasing and real estate agent for Disc Jockey Records in Owensboro, said the company’s Shelbyville Road Plaza store will move to the center’s east wing if the plans work out.
Seay said the Hawley-Cooke store will move to a vacant spot last occupied by Evans Furniture Showroom, according to plans. Graham Cooke, an owner of Hawley-Cooke, declined to discuss the plans, calling them preliminary.
The plans also include improving the center’s appearance. “It will be a remodeling of the whole center,” Seay said. “It will be mostly cosmetic, with a new façade.”
Seay noted that the center’s exterior was last renovated in 1992. “It’s getting dated again. We need to get it looking better.”
Janet Dieruf, owner of Paint Spot, a plaza business where customers paint pottery, welcomed plans to upgrade the center. “It’s absolutely wonderful,” Dieruf said. “I can’t see anything but something positive coming from it.”