Five Points Village Opens for Business

By Roger Harris, The Knoxville News-Sentinel, Tenn.

Mar. 16–After 23 years working for major grocery store chains, Martin Beidleman wasn’t really job-hunting when he agreed to meet a few weeks ago with the owners of Metro Village Market in the Five Points neighborhood.

“I really went to tell them I wasn’t looking for a new job, but once I saw the facility and saw what it would mean to the community I changed my mind,” Beidleman said Wednesday.

Beidleman, who previously worked for Kroger and Food City, now is general manager of Metro Village Market, anchor tenant of the new Five Points Village shopping center on Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue in the heart of East Knoxville.

The 20,000-square-foot IGA affiliate grocery held a “soft-opening” Wednesday to introduce itself to the community.

Developer LeRoy Thompson and grocery store veteran Norman Wright, co-owners of Metro Village Market, greeted a steady stream of neighborhood residents, elected officials, vendors and others who came to see the new store and do a little shopping.

“We’ve waited a long, long time for this,” said Sarah Moore Greene, a civil-rights pioneer and the first black resident elected to the city school board. She has lived in East Knoxville for more than 60 years.

Over the decades many of the stores serving Five Points and surrounding neighborhoods closed or moved to other parts of the city. The $6 million Five Points Village is one of the first new commercial developments in the area in years.

If the new shopping center is a success it will be a catalyst for other retail investment in the area, Greene said as she pushed a grocery cart through the store’s wide aisles.

“I’m real pleased. It’s a nice store,” she said.

The shopping center is already having an impact on the inner city economy, Thompson said.

All of the center’s existing 12,000 square feet of retail space has been leased and Thompson plans to start construction in 30 days on a 3,600-square-foot addition.

“We’ll build a shell and get maybe three businesses in there. I get calls all the time from businesses that want to be here,” Thompson said.

A drycleaner, salon/nail shop, bookstore and a title company are among the businesses that have expressed interest in the new space, Thompson said.

Existing shopping center tenants are Wells Fargo Home Mortgage, which has opened its new office; J-R’s House of Fashion, scheduled to open by the end of March; the Knox County Clerk, set to open a satellite office in April; and Caterer’s-Chef’s Kitchen, which will open later this spring.

Although the shopping center is fully leased, the opening of the grocery store was in doubt late last year when Jim Woods, one of the original owners and investors, dropped out due to worsening health and financial issues.

City government came to the rescue when Mayor Bill Haslam asked City Council for an additional $300,000 to get the grocery open. The council voted March 1 to provide the extra money.

The city previously had invested $1.25 million in taxpayer funds in the project. Knox County contributed $1 million, another $1.75 million came from Empowerment Zone funds, the Partnership for Neighborhood Improvement kicked in $350,000 and KUB provided a $250,000 in-kind contribution.

Thompson’s company, BDT Management & Development LLC, developer and majority owner of the shopping center, has put $780,000 into the project.

Another $1 million will be invested in the grocery store by a partnership formed by Thompson and Wright, a veteran grocer whose family business, Cox & Wright Inc., has operated grocery stores in the Knoxville region for years.

Cox & Wright now has a store in Rutledge. It previously had four stores in Knoxville, including two in East Knoxville.

Wright’s experience in the grocery business will be crucial to the long-term success of the market, Thompson said.

Public investment in the project will be returned many times through increased property values, job creation and increased spending in the inner city, all of which will generate increased real estate and sales tax revenue for local governments.

The grocery store, which offers fresh produce, seafood, a delicatessen and the usual assortment of canned and dry goods, has 10 full-time and 20 part-time employees. The shopping center will create a total of 70 to 80 full-time jobs when the other retail tenants are open, Thompson said.

Private investors expect to see a return on their investment, too, said the former Austin-East High School football star that also played at Penn State University and with the Pittsburgh Steelers in the National Football League.

“But I didn’t get into this just to make a profit,” Thompson said.

He intends the grocery store to be a place where young workers learn what it takes to run a successful business and build the skills they need to advance their careers.

And he wants the shopping center to bring a renewed retail spirit to the inner city.

“We’ve got enough check cashing stores and liquor stores. We want to do something different for the inner city. We want to bring new stores that you don’t typically see in the ‘hood’,” Thompson said.

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