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From The DowntownColumbus.com Blog:
In Search of a City: New Year’s Wish List Part Deux
With 500 new, market-rate housing units between Broad Street and Nationwide Boulevard, the area has gained enough households to support some neighborhood retail stores. Add 41,000 employees and 1135 hotel rooms within a five-minute walk of Broad and High, and the walk-in trade area has nearly $100 million of spending power.
Likely candidates for retail success include a green grocer, new and used book store, florist, bakery, GNC-style vitamin and nutrition store, pet supply store, dry cleaner, pharmacy, gift shop, Radio Shack-style electronics store, and office supply store. The challenge is finding vendors who will fill the void. If corporate chains will not open stores, are there independent folks who will?
Wow – unless I’m severely mireading this, I don’t think this writer has ever BEEN to downtown Columbus. Lots of the retail he or she mentioned is actually already here. Including a pharmacy(CVS), dry cleaner(Swan Cleaners), gift shop (in the Huntington) and an actual Radio Shack (hangs on in City Center.)
Also, office supplies on fourth and two florists that I can think of right away, T.Bear’s and Flowers on Main!
I was sort of wondering the same thing myself. Additionally, a lot of the more common things you can find in GNC can be found in CVS.
But I think the thought was more to get ideas going about what types of retail are missing right there, even if the original suggestions were not the best.
The Radioshack is closed.
There used to be a GNC right on high between broad and gay where that liquor mart is now if i remember. I think they closed it to move into city center back in the day. haha probably a bad move on their part in retrospect.
Sounds like there is some confusion going on with the responses. For the purposes of small retail shops, you can’t think of downtown as just one big market. Downtown (bounded by the innerbelt and the river) is 1300 acres. From the perspective of a *walkable* retail trade area, there are about 9 submarkets that can fit in that large of geography. So just because you have a florist at the Huntington Center doesn’t mean that there isn’t room for more florists throughout the downtown. In fact, there are several and they are scattered around in some of these potential submarkets.
Don’t get too hung up on exact areas for the submarkets but keep in mind that Capitol Square was and continues to be a barrier that divides walkable trade areas. Years and years ago, there was a department store cluster both south (Lazarus, The Fashion) and north (JC Penney, The Union, Madison’s) of the square. There were dime stores (Kresge’s and Woolworth’s) both north and south of the square. So while there is a CVS at State and High, the demand exists for another one on High Street north of Broad.
Well i dont think CVS saw it exactly that way since they closed the location they had on high north of broad for the one at state street. But really either way, I would love to see more retail downtown show up.
CVS closed their location north of Broad because they couldn’t find 10,000 square feet of space available north of Broad. The space they had was tiny and no other building north of Broad could offer anything better than that.
The lack of quality space of various sizes with landlords who know how to lease for retail is a major factor holding back downtown retailing.
Urbanschmurban, did you get a chance to listen to the podcast on downtown retail last week?
Somewhat topical for this discussion.