Sixteen West Marketplace gains another retailer
The Learning Source has moved its store from Orange Avenue to a stall inside Sixteen West Marketplace in downtown Roanoke. Photo by Amanda Codispoti
Sixteen West Marketplace on Church Avenue in downtown Roanoke has gained another tenant.
The Learning Source, a store that carries educational products catering to teachers, parents of home-schooled students and churches, has set up in one of the four stalls inside Sixteen West.
Store owner Marie Kinzie said the old 1,800 square-foot store on Orange Avenue was just too big.
“It was a lot of floor space to take care of,” she said.
Kinzie is a frequent customer of Cafe 16, a coffee bar also inside Sixteen West, and said the idea to move her goods into a stall struck her while she was getting coffee one morning.
She opened the new store last month. It still has all the products and services that were available at the Orange Avenue store, but not all products, such as charts and bulletin boards, are displayed because there isn’t enough room, Kinzie said. She has those items in storage for customers who request them.
The Learning Source joins several other businesses at Sixteen West, including CORE Chiropractic and Wellness, RAC Xpress, Cafe 16, S&W Market, and Fleda A. Ring Artworks. Healing Touch Studios, which offers massage therapy, is scheduled to open in March.
January 4, 2013 - 5:00 AM
It’s great that 16 West is gaining tenants! I just don’t see many teachers driving to downtown Roanoke to find school supplies for their classrooms. It seems like an odd place to relocate to. Of course, the old location wasn’t the best area either. Am I the only one who thinks this?
As a teacher, I know how busy the start of school is for us. Finding a parking place downtown definitely won’t encourage me to shop in that location during a time when my time is at a premium to begin with.
Yes, I agree 16West is an odd place for school supplies but at least it is a business. I visited 16West and it reminds me of a marketplace with a variety of different food stalls, retail etc. It is a different type of place for downtown and it looks like it is successful.
Well Justin, when you open YOUR school supplies store you can pick where you want it to be. The article wasn’t about the decision to locate the store there, rather it was the fact that a new business HAD located there. Downtown is growing for retail once again, and that’s a good thing because more customers means more parking needs, and more parking needs leads to solutions being found, IE remarking of fire and loading zone restrictions, construction of parking garages, creation of new lots, etc. I applaud the decision to locate the business there.
Didn’t mean to strike a nerve there, Jack Wright. Calm it down.
and meanwhile, back on Hershberger Road, cars are lined up all the way to Abingdon trying to get into Cook Out. Good lord people, it’s a hamburger……….
I don’t understand the percepion that it is somehow more difficult to park downtown, especially compared to getting in/out of the mall. I drive down Church Ave every day and 7 out of 10 times I can park on Church Ave. which is far faster to get in/out than any mall scenario. If you don’t want to take even that chance, there is always easy surface lot parking available a block away on Church and Williamson or garage parking on Market St, granted that will cost you a few dollars. My suggestion to the vendors is to take advantage of (and promote that you do) the City’s parking voucher program for your customers.
The good thing about this location is that there is in fact a lot of available parking. From the corner of Jefferson to the next block at 1st Street, it’s easy to find a free 1-hour spot available one both sides of Church Avenue here. I do this often during the week to visit 16 West and/or visit the post office on the corner of 1st & Church. If there aren’t any spaces in this block I can usually find one by turning left on 1st and parking withing the first 50 yards. If you really need to visit and neither of these stretches of road have a space free there is a flat paid lot almost across the street from 16W and a garage less than a block away in each direction. Problem solved.
#6 DJ, try telling that to the bloggers & posters on here about Chipotle and see what happens. Or even ChickFilA, for that matter. I agree with you, FWIW, but it amazes me that people seem so desperate, so hugely desperate, for some nationally franchised fast food. Sure the food is ‘good’ in the old, pre-hyped, sense of the definition of good. None of it is certainly ‘great’.
Then again, I think people who stand in line at 2:00 a.m. on Black Friday to buy a toaster oven on sale are insane, too. Don’t even get me started about Black Thanksgiving, either. It might cause the pretentious ‘That’s the only convenient time I have to shop’ fanatics to deluge the site.
All the same mindset – people do it so they can tell their friends (on Facebook, probably) that they did so.
I’m over hearing about the lack of parking downtown. There is plenty of parking. There may not be plenty of FREE parking, but the pay lots/garages are not cost prohibitive. Most people walk farther from their parking space to Walmart or a mall. Since when does “No free space in front of the door” = “No parking?”