Published: May 17, 2008 09:44 pm            

STEPHANIE SALTER: Somebody wants to make use of Plaza North? I must be dreaming

TERRE HAUTE — Oh, I had the most wonderful dream last week. I dreamed I picked up my Tribune-Star and read that a California call center company was coming to Terre Haute to open up shop and hire 600 local people.

Even dreamier, the company had chosen Plaza North for this unaccustomed labor largess.

Imagine, Plaza North. That shunned and exiled member of the Terre Haute shopping triplets that were born in the late-1950s and include Meadows and Southland.

Plaza North — which has been passed around like the proverbial football (or fallen woman) to so many local and out-of-state keepers over the years, it’s a miracle any business entity more complex than a Kool-Aid stand wants to rent space there.

And yet, along comes a huge company that chooses to put 600 jobs there. Jobs that don’t involve manufacturing and inhaling toxic substances and pumping the residue into the Wabash River or the county’s underground aquifer.

Why, it must have been a dream, right?

Except … several days have passed, and I have three-dimensional proof right in front of my open eyes. Sure enough, Alorica Inc., based in Chino, Calif., with call centers in such solid Midwestern cities as Topeka, Tulsa and Sioux City, has selected Plaza North — in the NORTH end of Terre Haute — on which to bestow this good fortune.

(Now, all the months of playing bumper cars around the bridge expansion on Fort Harrison near 13th Street will not have been in vain.)

Plaza North’s fate actually has been looking up ever since March 2007 when the Weston, Fla.-based company, Coastal Equities, took over ownership of the 326,500-square-foot shopping complex. The president of the company, Howard Arnberg, won an immediate place in my heart then when he said Coastal tended to invest “in areas that others don’t find so fashionable.”

Talk about refreshing. For decades, as our demographics declined in volume and income, North-enders and our money have been treated like untouchables at the bottom of a caste system. While every national and regional retail chain crowded into the South Third Street/Dixie Bee Highway corridor, 12 Points and Plaza North were left to hold themselves together with a handful of terrific, die-hard merchants, restaurants and small businesses.

Most North-enders live in fear that Menards, the teeming hub of retail to the west of Plaza North, will move out despite its obvious success and leave us for more “fashionable” environs.

Every time a “For Lease or Sale” sign goes up in a deserted building along Fort Harrison from Lafayette Avenue to 13th Street, we shudder at the implications. On the rare and happy occasion that a commercial entity moves in — say, Big Lots and Applebee’s — we rejoice. And we patronize.

Three years ago, when Plaza North was owned by some guys from Kansas, I asked Trib-Star readers to submit their wishlists for North-end-serving businesses. As some of you may remember, more than 1,100 people responded within a week. Several hundred more answers trickled in.

The overwhelming desire was for a family clothing store. Not something ritzy like Saks Fifth Avenue, but something above the dollar-store inventory of flip-flops and packaged cotton underwear.

There are so many of these middle-income clothing stores up and down Dixie Bee Highway, you would think that just one — not doing gangbusters against all the competition — might consider moving north to enjoy a monopoly. But, no. Not so far.

Then there are non-fast-food places to go in, sit down and eat. With 600 new workers coming in the next year, Plaza North will need more than Applebee’s and (God, bless them for staying) Fortune Chinese Buffet. Alorica employees can go down Lafayette Avenue to Gerhardt’s Bierstube or across Fort Harrison to La Isla Mexican restaurant once in awhile for lunch, but another eating spot in the shopping center seems in order.

After the Alorica announcement, I went to Coastal Equities Web site and learned a lot about us North-enders. In a downloadable, 12-page Demographic Snapshot Report, the immediate area is dissected and identified and compared with the areas within a 3-mile radius and 5-mile radius. The latter is basically a picture of Terre Haute.

The snapshots are based on 2006 figures and I will go into them in more detail in Wednesday’s column. Suffice to say, they tell me why Target has not broken its butt to open a store in our fair city and why, if it does open one, it will be in the south-end corridor with everything else, as a Target exec told me three years ago.

Within a 5-mile radius of Plaza North, there were only 31 households with annual incomes over $500,000 and only 152 over $250,000. In the immediate area of the shopping center, there were zero households in both of these high-income categories.

As for households with annual incomes between $150,000 and $249,000, there were all of six within a mile of Plaza North.

With this and much more demographic information in mind, maybe we North-enders can help Coastal Equities’ local group, Plaza North LLC, seek and find a few more tenants. It would be especially nice to see the former movie theater/Dean’s Party Mania site transformed into a neighborhood-serving business that will be glad it moved into our less fashionable, but much-needed, shopping center.



Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.

        

• Click to discuss this story with other readers on our forums.