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One Step Closer, Two Steps Back.

© Michael Morrissey

A decade or so ago drugstore chains began vacating the downtown section of our cities, choosing instead to join the supermarkets in their strip malls or to build large free standing stores on the outskirts of town, just a few traffic lights away from the giant supermarkets and the "big box" discount stores. Preservationists decried the move, chastising the drugstores for abandoning the downtown and for contributing to sprawl. The drugstores on the other hand said their move was well thought out, they were simply keeping pace with the changing lifestyles and priorities of modern life. Downtown's were in decline, malls and "big box" retailers were on the rise and the main thoroughfare, with it's phalanx of stop lights and traffic signs, was becoming the de-facto Main Street for the auto-enabled busy suburban lifestyle.

In more recent times, thanks to a good economy and many a downtown revitalization effort, people and businesses began re-discovering the downtown district. The big drugstore conglomerates did too. This time the carefully selected sites for their cinderblock and parking lot creations were, literally, the center of town. With little variance, they follow their tried and true formula; build an 11,000 square foot cinderblock box with adjacent parking for about 60 cars and an all important drive-through window for prescription pickups. These buildings in no way match or even attempt to match, the downtown's existing buildings in terms of design, quality, or adaptability for future use. In addition, the invading drugstores are more than willing, in fact are nearly insistent on knocking down any building currently occupying the spot they want.

Arguments abound on both sides of the issue:

It's nice that the drugstores are coming back to the downtown area, but why do they have to destroy it in the process?

For too long the downtowns of many cities have been abandoned. Buildings boarded up, business going elsewhere, and now, just as the spark of new life is starting to come back, someone's trying to snuff it out by forcing the new businesses to re-use the old structures that drove business away in the first place.

It's the best of both worlds, we can get rid of those old leaky buildings, and give our downtown an economically reliable tenant.

Who's to say they're going to stay in the downtown? They abandoned their well-laid plans for stores scattered on the outskirts of town pretty quickly.

It's true that the chain drugstores have the potential to stabilize, even encourage a fledgling downtown revitalization effort, after all these are not mom and pop operations. They are conglomerates with millions of dollars behind them, at least until the next economic downturn, or shift in local demographics, that's when the home office decides to close a few branches. That's when they're quick to abandon the downtown area leaving behind an utterly useless and ugly building, not to mention the parking lot and drive-through.

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