For all the local interest in seeing something done with the old Cloverleaf Mall, it was an outsider who took the biggest shot during a ceremony on the site Tuesday morning.
Not letting a smart gray pinstripe suit stop him from playing the role of demolition expert, North Carolina developer James Downs gripped a gold-colored sledgehammer and whaled away on a brick wall at the closed mall on Midlothian Turnpike.
"That was five years of frustration," said Downs, a vice president of Crosland, which is redeveloping the site into a mixed-use development called Stonebridge. "I'm not sure I actually knocked anything off, but it felt good."
After nearly a decade of planning, piecing together property — at a cost of more than $16 million — and hoping it would all work out, county officials finally got to hold their party. They invited more than 100 people, with county leaders past and present sharing the day with a who's who of Chesterfield businesspeople. With the Monacan High School jazz band playing and King's Korner dishing out barbecue, the parking lot had more of a feel of a football game than a land deal.
"What you see here is the new frontier of America," Tom Jacobson, director of revitalization for Chesterfield, told the crowd.
In the next year, that frontier will lose its long-standing mall and see the development of a Kroger store, slated to be the largest on the East Coast. The $18.5 million store will employ 250 people and should be open by Thanksgiving 2012. That part of the project will take up roughly a third of the 82-plus-acre mall property, in the corner fronting Midlothian Turnpike and Chippenham Parkway.
The whole mall project will be done in three stages and, if completed as planned, will ultimately include more than 300,000 square feet of retail development and 350 multi-family residences.
"This is smart growth," said Daniel A. Gecker, the Midlothian District member of the Chesterfield County Board of Supervisors.
He said Kroger should spur other development — "Once people see one thing, they'll want more," he said — and help the county realize its goal of redeveloping some of the county's more mature retail sectors.
"As I said before, this will become a destination," he said. "It'll become a place to go, not just a place they pass through."
Board Chairman A.S. "Art" Warren, who joined Gecker in taking the first ceremonial swings at the brick wall — a heavy-equipment operator beat the dignitaries to the punch at 11:57 a.m., tearing the "ver" off the Cloverleaf Mall wording above the main entrance to the mall — said it was a bittersweet moment.
"Everyone has a Cloverleaf memory," he said. "I remember shopping at the Sears here in the 1970s. But I guess it's time for something new."
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