It’s put-up or shut-up time for Kroger. The giant supermarket chain says it wants to work with the community to make sure that its planned store on the old Dr Pepper site at Mockingbird and Greenville satisfies everyone: Kroger, the neighborhoods around the site and the City.
We shall see.
The Dr Pepper site is important to East Dallas, and not only because it is historically and architecturally significant. It is important because this is going to be our first opportunity to have a voice in the development of our neighborhood. We will not have to watch in frustration and rage as some slick operator sitting in a high-rise at the Tollway and LBJ decides the future of our neighborhood.
That’s one of the good things about democracy, and the changes in Dallas over the past couple of years. Kroger just can’t buy the land, throw up a suburban strip shopping center-style building, and sit back and count its money. They have to take our opinions into account.
I’m not sure that’s something that Kroger understands. I’m afraid all Kroger sees is a vacant parcel of land just a couple of blocks from the Park Cities in a part of town where there are plenty of people and not nearly as many grocery stores.
A couple of things worry me about Kroger’s plans, of which the chain has been just open enough so that no one can accuse it of being less than forthright, but not so open we can figure out what will happen.
First, Kroger has yet to tell anyone what kind of store it is going to build – and is already tearing down buildings on the site and preparing the land for construction. The last thing anyone in the neighborhood wants is the sort of store Kroger builds all of the time – white and plastic-looking with those light towers in the parking lot. If we wanted that type of store, we would live in Hurst.
Second, Kroger has yet to tell anyone exactly how it will handle the traffic problems the store will almost certainly create. The Mockingbird-Greenville intersection is far from efficient now, and adding the countless cars that the store will bring can only make that intersection worse.
The City has agreed to give Kroger a left-turn lane on east-bound Mockingbird that will empty into the store’s parking lot. And that seems to be OK, as far as it goes.
What Kroger has remained mum about is its plans for southbound Greenville north of Mockingbird, which is currently a one-way street. I may be only a curmudgeonly crank with little experience in the high-flying world of real estate development, but even I know no one wants to build a grocery store that fronts on a one-way street. Does this mean Kroger will ask the City to re-stripe the Greenville and Matilda bridges?
If so, now is a good time to tell us. That is the sort of thing good neighbors do. They don’t wait until after the deed is done.
After all, Kroger’s track record in communities such as East Dallas does not inspire confidence. For one thing, its stores – like those of Tom Thumb and Albertson’s – never seem to show up in neighborhoods such as ours.
Instead, they always seem to show up in affluent, mostly white suburbs – three in Garland, for instance. There are just two Krogers in Oak Cliff, and the chain seems to have written off even Lake Highlands, where it is down to two stores after closing one.
The only Kroger in East Dallas at Ross and Henderson, and regular readers of this space know I feel about this store.
If Kroger wants to be a good neighbor, I’ll welcome them. The catch is whether they want to be a good neighbor to us, or to themselves.
