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Hill District developer proposes supermarket
Sunday, October 15, 2000 By Tom Barnes, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Hill District developer Irvin Williams has a simple reason for wanting to build a supermarket on Centre Avenue.
"I want to be able to buy a can of string beans in my own neighborhood," said Williams, who lives in Crawford Square, the complex of several hundred apartments and single-family homes above Mellon Arena.
Williams, president of Ebony Development Co., has his offices in Williams Square, a three-story office building he built three years ago on Centre Avenue, a block from Crawford Square.
Three blocks farther up the street, he plans to build One Hope Square, another small office building costing $2.8 million that will have retail shops on the ground floor.
Now he's exploring the idea of building a 40,000-square-foot supermarket that would be on what is now a vacant, weed-infested lot directly across Centre from the Hill House community center.
The site, most of which is owned by the city's Urban Redevelopment Authority, also is adjacent to a small shopping center called the AUBA Triangle Shops at Centre and Dinwiddie Street. AUBA owns a small part of the land Williams has in mind for his grocery project.
A supermarket in the Lower Hill may not sound like a big deal, but it is. It's a project that has stymied city officials and other developers for nearly 10 years.
Williams has talked with an Ohio-based food distributor, Fleming Foods Co., about supplying the produce, canned goods and other foodstuffs.
URA Executive Director Mulugetta Birru is one of those officials who has tried for several years to put together a deal for a supermarket in the Lower Hill.
Two years ago, Birru thought he had reached agreement with officials of food distributor SuperValu to put a Shop 'n Save on the Centre Avenue site.
The URA spent more than $1 million to acquire numerous parcels of property and demolish some buildings on Heldman Street to prepare the land for construction.
Birru said it was a great disappointment when Shop 'n Save changed its mind last year and decided not to go ahead with the project.
Birru said he also had brought Giant Eagle officials into the lower Hill, but that they didn't think the area was economically ready to support a supermarket.
Birru said he was willing to work with Williams but cautioned that there still was a long way to go before the supermarket becomes a reality.
Another supporter is Elbert Hatley, director of the Hill District Community Development Corp., a nonprofit neighborhood association.
"There's no question a supermarket would be good for the community," Hatley said. "There is unified support from our CDC, the Hill District Federal Credit Union, the AUBA and the Hill House Association."
He said he had given Fleming Foods a 1999 "strategy report" on the Hill District, a document that "gets to the heart of consumer income in the community and details the buying habits, lifestyles and the kinds of things this community spends its money on."
Williams said his proposed supermarket of 40,000 square feet would be slightly smaller than the 53,000-square-foot Giant Eagle store on the South Side and would be considerably smaller than the large stores that Giant Eagle and Shop 'n Save have been building in suburban locations.
He said he would like to combine the supermarket with another 15,000 square feet of retail space, perhaps seven to 10 other stores in a small shopping center behind the grocery. Williams would like one of those businesses to be a pizza shop. There would be about 140 parking spaces.
He acknowledged that he was still battling negative perceptions about the Hill, especially fears of outsiders about drug activity.
"There needs to be a large-scale development. It can't be done piecemeal," he said.
He's hoping that the office building he's already built, plus One Hope Square and the new grocery and other stores, will win over the doubters and bring more people into the Hill.
He said his wife, Janicee, named One Hope Square because she wants to "bring hope back into the neighborhood."
The Lower Hill has changed for the better with the infusion of more than 400 apartments and for-sale houses in Crawford Square, Williams said, adding that the new retail projects he had in mind would continue the progress.
"Retail businesses for people to shop in are part of a healthy neighborhood," he said.
The supermarket/shopping center project could cost about $4 million, he said. He was hoping the city and URA, which have put together a financial package for Shop 'n Save, could provide about 30 percent of the funding, and the rest would be private, much of it through a bank loan.
The entire parcel in question runs along Heldman Street from Centre to Reed Street, which Williams said was large enough to contain both the grocery and the small shopping center. A street running through the middle of the parcel, Rose Street, would be eliminated.
Williams said he thought the demographics of the areas around Centre Avenue had improved to the point where a grocery can be sustained.
He said there were about 5,000 people living in an area from the apartments in Gateway Center to western Oakland.
The closest supermarket now to serve that area is a Giant Eagle at Centre and Craig Street in Oakland.
He said he and his neighbors also traveled to the Giant Eagle on the South Side and to the North Hills and Robinson to buy food.
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