Whole Foods’ opening is first of latest retail push in McEwen area
Customers pour into Whole Foods Market on Wednesday for the grand opening at its new location in Franklin. Plans for the store have been in the works for four years.
The Tennessean, May 19, 2011
With every shelf pin-neat and jammed with food and its walls decorated with local history, the new McEwen Whole Foods store opened this week — after nearly four years of waiting.
If all goes well, diners, shoppers and residents won’t have to wait as long to see even more development here. Hailed since 2007 as Franklin’s next mixed-use hub, McEwen developers at Southern Land Co. say they have managed to ride out a national recession that left them scuttling plans and waiting for the economy to improve before moving forward. The plan to build a Whole Foods store, which is 40,000 square feet and cost nearly $3 million, was first announced nearly four years ago, but construction began in earnest only last year.
“Consumer confidence went away, banks weren’t lending money,” said Paul Neuroth, senior vice president for Southern Land Co. “I think everybody’s feeling more optimistic. It’s all about consumers. Retailers want to expand.”
The opening of Whole Foods and other groundbreakings slated for this summer offer proof that momentum of the 93-acre McEwen development, which is near Mallory Lane and McEwen Drive just off Interstate 65, might have finally picked up.
The Whole Foods store is an anchor of a retail and restaurant development known as Southside at McEwen. Next door, Southern Land will break ground in June on a proposed 40,000-square-foot mixed-use development, Neuroth said. Adjacent to the grocery is BrickTop’s, a restaurant that is under construction and expected to open by September.
Across McEwen Drive, crews are slated to break ground in August on the 112-unit second phase of the Dwell apartment complex. The $44.1 million development’s first 259 units were completed in 2009, making them Franklin’s first apartment complex to be completed in about a decade.
New hotel is rising
Southern Land Co.’s McEwen isn’t the only site where work is going on in earnest. Across Moores Lane, the sound of hammering can be heard inside the concrete structure of a Drury Hotel that will most likely open early next year. Construction on the 344-room, 11-story hotel began in the fall after its own years of delays. Southern Land had planned to build a 150-room hotel, but the sour national economy left it to scrap that idea.
Down McEwen Drive toward Cool Springs Boulevard, First Farmers & Merchants Bank plans to build a 4,030-square-foot branch off McEwen Drive.
Alderman Beverly Burger, who represents Ward 1, sees the area’s development from what was once empty to offering jobs and homes as being as important as other, older parts of the city.
“The McEwen area is the sister to downtown in terms of economic development, in terms of ambience, in terms of visitors, that kind of thing,” Burger said. “It is Franklin. … Nothing will ever replace (the downtown) but it’s a total synergy of our community. It balances it totally out. It’s two sister areas.”
Wood came from Leiper’s Fork barn
Whole Foods spokeswoman Darrah Horgan stopped short of saying the delay in the new Franklin store — the Austin, Texas, chain’s 305th store — was directly tied to the recession.
The years of waiting didn’t hamper interest in the new store. On Wednesday morning, more than 400 people waited in the chilly morning air for free coffee, scones and a piece of a ceremonial 6-foot-long loaf of bread before crowding into the store.
At 40,000 square feet, the McEwen Whole Foods store is about 5,000 feet smaller than the Green Hills Whole Foods location. Yet if it’s smaller, it’s more connected as the chain has made an effort to literally incorporate parts of each community into its store’s decor and the food sold on its shelves.
For example, a Leiper’s Fork barn was disassembled by Whole Foods workers and parts of it, including hinges, wood and sticks once used to dry tobacco leaves, are displayed around the store. Two doors once used in a 1900s era schoolhouse are being reused at the entrance of the store’s community room.
Contact Kevin Walters
at 615-771-5472 or kewalters@tennessean.com.
