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The old Wards building has new life as an automotive parts store and a former Wal-Mart will become a church.
By SHARON L. BOND, Neighborhood Times Business Editor
© St. Petersburg Times, published September 8, 2002
ST. PETERSBURG -- The signs for Texas and Utah are all that remain of the parking lot identification system, and there is a Wards catalog from 1959, the year the Central Plaza Montgomery Ward was built.
But it is almost as if the Ward department store was never there. Now occupying most of its 180,000-square-foot building on 8.5 acres is the Super Parts Automotive Warehouse. The building has a new stucco coat, and its interior is a warehouse, office complex and small retail store for Super Parts. The escalator that carried shoppers from the men's or women's clothing sections up to housewares now is a conveyor belt moving small boxes of parts from the second floor down to the first.
Montgomery Ward has gone out of business, leaving behind a number of its "big-box" stores, sitting empty. At Crossroads Shopping Center in St. Petersburg, the Wards store will be torn down. In Pinellas Park, the future of the ParkSide Mall Montgomery Ward is in question and also may be torn down.
A glance around south Pinellas shows that a number of big boxes have been refitted for other lives. Not all were Montgomery Ward shells.
A former Sam's Club building in Pinellas Park is the Pinellas Expo, a venue for trade shows, and the former Scotty's home improvement building in St. Petersburg has emerged from ragged neglect as a bright store chock full of carpet, floorings and furniture, JB Factory Carpets. The Wal-Mart left behind on U.S. 19 when the new supercenter opened in Pinellas Park will become Calvary Chapel.
"At the end of May we felt like we were in here," said John Cannon, who with Robb, Ron and Michael Bauman owns Florida Automotive Distributing Inc., the parent company of Super Parts Automotive and several other affiliates. It now has 10 locations and a total of 160 employees.
The need for room to expand was what sent the company on a search for new quarters and led to the old Montgomery Ward building at 201 34th St. N. Florida Automotive also looked at the old Wal-Mart in Pinellas Park.
The Baumans' father and grandfather started the business as Central Garage at 334 Second Ave. S in 1949. It remains part of the company but is called Gulf Coast Automotive Services. Florida Automotive is an AC Delco regional distributor and carries vehicle replacement parts that it sells to other parts shops, car dealers and local repair shops. It also sells to the public from a small retail shop on the 34th Street side of the building.
Cannon, who shopped in Montgomery Ward as a child, said the company spent $4-million purchasing and renovating the site, including extensive landscaping. Asbestos had to be removed along with an underground diesel storage tank. Offices were built on the ground floor.
Several years ago, offices for GE Financial Assurance were built on the second floor. GE remains there for another five years at least, according to Cannon. Super Parts has about a third of the upstairs, which it uses as a warehouse.
Florida Automotive is preserving what few artifacts it has from the building's former life and would like others to display in the building's reception area. The Utah and Texas signs are among the relics.
"You know how when you go to Disney World, you park in Goofy 52? These were all around the parking lot. It was in the heyday of Festival of States," said Cannon, holding up the signs.
Florida Automotive wanted to stay close to St. Petersburg since that is where its workforce lives, Cannon said. The company has approximately 100 workers at the Wards site. Some take the bus or ride bicycles to work, he said. Those workers would have been lost had the company moved out of St. Petersburg.
In finding a spot to expand and redoing the building to suit its needs, Florida Automotive also got rid of a potential eyesore and restored a payer to the property tax rolls.
"Any time you have a property that large, its visual negative impact to the corridor can be pretty significant," said Ron Barton, director of economic impact for St. Petersburg.
The Montgomery Ward building at Central Plaza was not empty very long but over its last few years as an outlet, it had become the dumping ground of the chain, Cannon said.
"We threw away hundreds of beautiful wood tables" that had no bases or legs, Cannon said. "There were scores of headboards and foot boards but no side rails." The Salvation Army took away as much as it could use, he said.
The rehab of the Wards building comes as the rest of the Central Plaza shopping district is sprucing up and nearly full of tenants. Barton said Florida Automotive Distributing did a very creative job with the Ward's building, and it would be a good model for other fixer-uppers of big boxes to follow.
Barton said the city is going through a rewrite of zoning and land development regulations to make such a rehab easier.
"The problem redevelopers have with some of these properties is that they conflict with zoning. Existing zoning will only allow a couple of uses within the code."
When redevelopers have to get a number of variances and exceptions, they often give up, Barton said.
How codes could be changed to ease redevelopment is something as simple as being more flexible on the number of parking spaces required if a redeveloper needs more building space and doesn't attract much traffic.
Shakeout continues in the retail market. Barton said St. Petersburg escaped getting a number of empty big boxes when Kmart decided to leave its stores in south Pinellas open. The discounter is attempting to reorganize its business under bankruptcy protection and has closed or is closing a number of stores.
Some retailers put conditions on the sale of their big boxes, which limits their reuses and can be the reason some stand vacant.
Wal-Mart sold its empty store on 14 acres at U.S. 19 N in Pinellas Park to the Calvary Chapel for $2.4-million, said Pastor Bob Corry. The deal contained a 50-year deed restriction that prohibits any sort of discount store from locating there. Wal-Mart made sure a competitor couldn't set up in its old location, Corry said.
His church is planning the renovations it will make to turn the old discount store into a meeting place for 1,500 to 2,000 chapel members. A high priority will be a sound system for music. Corry hopes work will begin by the end of the year. The rehab probably will cost between $3-million and $5-million, he said.
"What do you do with these big boxes?" Corry asked. "We love them. They are very user-friendly buildings for us." The chapel, nondenominational and made up of born-again Christians, is meeting in a former Winn-Dixie and Eckerd now, he said. A previous home was a warehouse.
"We are a whole lot more into the function of a building than into traditional facades. We could look at a bowling alley and say, 'This is a great place to meet.' "