After we moved to Long Reach in 1998, we did our grocery shopping at the village center's Safeway store, which at that time was the only nearby supermarket. That was OK with us. The Safeway had a pretty good produce section and most anything else we might want for fridge and pantry. We didn't need another store.
A few years later, though, we got one anyway.
The Palace 9 movie theater on Centre Park Drive shut down in 2001, and not long after a shiny new Giant had taken its place. Naturally curious, we checked it out. It didn't exactly knock your socks off (that came years later, when Wegmans opened alongside Snowden River Parkway), but by comparison, the village center Safeway suddenly seemed a little shabby.
That perception, though, probably had less to do with the store itself than its surroundings. The Long Reach Village Center had, over the years, become what the kids would call "a little sketchy." There always seemed to be vacant storefronts and men hanging about, seemingly with nothing better to do. The vibe was less than welcoming. It would only grow worse.
For a while, nonetheless, we continued to do our shopping at the Safeway. We'd lived in Columbia long enough to have absorbed the virtues of the village center concept, so integral to the planned city's ethos. We wanted to support it, and we knew that if the Safeway couldn't hang in there, the center's decline would accelerate exponentially and it would become a real problem.
So even though it wasn't the cheeriest place, we stuck with it. Oh, every now and then we'd run over to the Giant if we needed just a couple of things or were just in a hurry. Even though it's across Route 108 from our neighborhood of Phelps Luck, it's actually closer to us than the village center, within a 10-minute walk from our house, in fact.
Yep, sure was convenient.
Gradually, of course, our trips to the Safeway became less frequent. At the same time, the store grew ever more weary. Customers became more and more scarce. The inventory started getting thin. The produce wasn't up to its old standards of freshness.
Meanwhile, a police substation had set up shop in an adjacent storefront, which gave village center patrons the curious sensation of feeling both safer and more at risk than ever.
When the Safeway closed in 2011, part of me felt relief. I would no longer face the choice between supporting village center merchants and shopping someplace nicer that was also more convenient to me.
At the same time, I felt as though I had let my neighbors down. I felt less like a Columbian and more like a garden-variety suburbanite. Marketing and the incessant corporate drive toward bigger, newer, more had triumphed over that deep sense of community Columbia founder James Rouse had worked so hard to instill in this town.
The ethnic foods store that leased the space from Safeway's parent company after that didn't fare any better, and was evicted in 2013 after falling behind in its rent.
A year ago, the county government stepped in, announcing it would buy up most of the village center property and that Celebration Church would move from its existing facility on nearby Foreland Garth to the 55,000-square-foot Safeway space. The revitalization plan has hit a snag, though, as the county and the church could not agree on what the church ought to pay for parking rights at the center.
The county's contract for purchase of the rest of the village center gave the church 120 days to complete the deal for the anchor space. Now that that window has passed, the county must buy it too.
The optimist in me wants to go with County Council member Greg Fox's assessment that recent developments could turn out to be a blessing in disguise. As reported last week, Fox had criticized the plan to turn the parking over to the church as tying the county's hands in the redevelopment effort.
"I think starting with a blank slate that is not encumbered really provides more opportunities to the village of Long Reach," Fox told reporter Amanda Yeager.
With those opportunities, however, come more uncertainty. Again without an anchor, the Long Reach Village Center is in danger of drifting so far that it may never reach its home port.