Employees of City People’s Garden Store continue to look for a new location in the wake of the popular business’s impending closure at the end of this year.
But they say they face two major obstacles: they need to find a location and they need to figure out how to pay for it.
In an open letter that went out to subscribers of the store’s e-newsletter June 16, Jose Gonzales and Alison Greene asked for the community’s help finding a new home for City People’s.
“If you have any insights, connections, or have recently won the lottery and are not sure what to do with the winnings, please get in touch right away,” they wrote.
Working with owners Steve Magley and Dianne Casper, the employees determined they would need a 10,000-square-foot, mostly outdoor lot within five miles of the current store’s location. Then they would need $500,000 in seed money, they wrote.
“The prospect is daunting, but what keeps us moving forward has been the support we hear from so many of you and also our belief … that the city NEEDS [emphasis theirs] this garden store,” Gonzales and Greene wrote.
The store announced on its website in March that it would close its doors at the end of 2016, due to the sale of the property to an owner that wished to develop the site into a multi-story retail and apartment building.
A portion of the community, some of whom have organized into a group called Save Madison Valley, has been highly critical of the proposed project.
Many of these critics have pointed to the building’s potential to congest East Madison Street with traffic from a residential parking garage and truck deliveries to a planned PCC Natural Market grocery store in the building’s ground floor.
Some residents of Dewey Place East in the valley neighborhood below City People’s have said the proposed project would hinder their views and sunlight, and change the character of the Madison Valley neighborhood.
Others, like Madison Park resident Reg Newbeck, said they think the project’s getting a bad rap and that the community could do worse than PCC.
“They are getting a black eye like they are a national chain … and no one is talking about the good they do like recent funding for the Senior Meals on Wheels,” Newbeck recently wrote in a letter to Madison Park Times.
The project goes to the city Department of Construction and Inspections for early design guidance July 27.
