New Woolworth building owners thinking big

“It’s sad. It’s like losing a part of the family.”
– Diane Chamineak, lunch counter manager, F.W. Woolworth & Co. Broad Street store, June 20, 1991

The former F.W. Woolworth & Co. store at Eighth and Broad streets has gone through a few owners since the lights went out for good in 1992.

Other than a brief period when it was used to warehouse gambling equipment, the old five-and-dime has spent most of those 15 years as just another vacant relic of a bygone era of downtown commerce.

The building’s newest owners have different plans.

File this one under Local Boy Does Good: Starworth Properties LLC, the Atlanta investment group that acquired the building last month, is fronted by former Augusta resident Nobel Benefield.

Mr. Benefield and his partners, including a big-money real estate investor from Los Angeles, are in the early stages of renovating the cream -and-red two-story into a commercial-residential development. He said the group’s plans will be announced after they have finished consulting local architects and government officials.

“There’s two or three different possibilities,” Mr. Benefield said. “We don’t want to say we’re going to go in one direction and then have to go in a different direction.”

The Woolworth building is special to many longtime residents.

Built in 1939*, it was one of downtown Augusta’s most popular retailers. It’s busy lunch counter was the site of a civil rights era sit-in demonstration in 1960 that was led by a group of Paine College students who, under laws of the day, could order food at the counter only if they ate in the back corner of the building. When the company announced the store would close in 1991, so many people protested that it remained open for another year. Today, it joins the old Kress and J.C. Penney buildings as the last remaining “white elephant” buildings on Broad Street.

Mr. Benefield, who spends most of his time in Atlanta, said he has family in Augusta and considers the city home. He said his motivations are equal parts civic and capitalistic (the latter of which is understandable, considering that his group dropped $520,000 on the building).

“We want something that is going to be beneficial to the community – and to us,” he said.

’m sure we’ll learn more about Mr. Benefield and his company’s plans for the building in the coming months. Keep your dial tuned to Scuttle FM (or Sirius Scuttle, if you’re bent that way) for more details.

NEVER WAS GOOD AT FRACTIONS: Fifth Third Bancorp’s signs are now hanging on the three former R-G Crown Augusta bank branches. The Cincinnati-based company picked up the local offices as part of its previously announced acquisition of R-G Crown’s 30 Florida branches. The deal officially closed Nov. 2, making Fifth Third the latest contestant in what is shaping up to be a banking battle royale** in the Augusta market.

Fifth Third Bank … Fifth Third Bank … Fifth Third Bank. I’ll be honest, that’s going to take a while to get used to.

I’m still referring to the Rite-Aids as Eckerds.

SAME AS THE OLD BOSS: You might have heard recently that the holder of the region’s largest government contract, Savannah River Site operator Washington Group International, has been acquired by another company, San Francisco-based URS Corp. Shareholders approved the deal last week, and the merger should occur before the end of the year.

Unlike most corporate consolidations, this one doesn’t appear to be bad news for Augusta-Aiken.

The $3.2 billion deal will make Washington Group a division of URS. The division will be led by Steve Hanks, Washington Group’s chief executive, and will be based in Boise, Idaho, home of Washington Group’s headquarters . Together, the companies will have nearly 55,000 employees and will create the nation’s fourth-largest publicly traded engineering and construction firm.

“The merger will not affect the Savannah River Site operations or management team,” Washington Group spokeswoman Laurie Spiegelberg said. “The reason we’ve been so successful at SRS for so many years is because we provide the DOE such world-class talent and service. And we will continue to do that.”

That is, if Washington Group’s Washington Savannah River Co. subsidiary is successful in holding onto its SRS management and operations contract.

The five-year, $4 billion contract is under evaluation by the Department of Energy. WSRC’s main competitor is Savannah River Nuclear Solutions LLC, whose partners include engineering giant Fluor Daniel, Honeywell, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin.
A decision is expected by mid-2008. Normally, I’d end this with a cheesy mediaspeak phrase such as “you’ll hear it here first,” but let’s be honest: There’s so many people interested in this story, it’s not going to slip under anyone’s radar.

We’re talking $4 billion here.

RANDOM OBSERVATION: The U-Haul Co. store at 1589 Broad St. (the old Claussen’s Bakery building) is looking really good these days. It’s amazing what a fresh coat of paint can do.

DON’T CALL US, WE’LL CALL YOU: There was a lot of excitement in town in September 2006 when a Florida home warranty company conducted a job fair to test the waters for a 350-employee call center.

The company, Cross Country Home Services Inc., was swamped with applicants interested in working at the 50,000-square-foot call center that the company said just might, possibly, maybe, at some point in the future, be built in Augusta.

Last we heard, a decision would be made in early 2008.

Meanwhile, the company has taken the job fair road show to other markets, including Anderson, S.C., where a daylong “open house” will be held Tuesday at the Tri-County Technical College at 511 Michelin Blvd.

KROGER FANS, REJOICE: The Kroger Co. says renovation work on its gigantor store at 2801 Washington Road will be finished in March, not July as it originally reported.
Can we get these folks to start doing work on highway projects?

* A bit of trivia: Augusta’s first Woolworth opened in 1914, 35 years after Frank Woolworth opened the one in Utica, N.Y. in 1879. The modern- day retail equivalent, Wal-Mart, opened its first Augusta store in 1987, 25 years after Sam Walton opened his first one in Rogers, Ark. This proves a Southerner can sometimes move faster than a Yankee.

** A side note: I was having lunch with a friend who is a mortgage loan officer for a local bank. We both agreed that there probably has never been a better time to be a commercial banker in the Augusta market. Not because the local economy is bursting at the seams, mind you, but because all the new banks are dangling large salaries to lure bankers away from competing institutions, forcing existing ones to raise their salaries to keep their bankers from defecting to the competition.

Is it too late to get my MBA?