The coming roadway improvements on the north side of downtown Fayetteville in the next year or two will bring another change for shoppers at Hudson Plaza. The changes at the intersection of Ga. highways 85 and 92 will also bring a new look to the city’s oldest retail shopping center.
“There’s a new look coming to Fayetteville in the oldest shopping center in the city,” said Southeast Properties, Inc. founder Bill Bonner of the upcoming changes to the Hudson Plaza Shopping Center. That new look is expected to be evident sometime in the fall.
The Fayetteville City Council in January approved the two largest land acquisition measures that designed to make way for Hwy. 92/Hood Avenue/Kathi Avenue/Jeff Davis Drive Connector project that will significantly alter the roadway landscape on the north side of downtown.
A part of that project includes the removal of the the smaller, southernmost Hudson Plaza building positioned perpendicular to Hwy. 85 and situated across from Hood Avenue. The traffic signal will be moved to Hood Avenue from its current location just to the north at Hwy. 92.
Bonner said the businesses located in the building to be demolished will have the opportunity to move into the larger building later this year. The smaller building will be turned over to the city prior to January 2013 to make way for the new roadway that will link Hood Avenue with Kathi Avenue. The businesses currently housed in the smaller building include Play-It-Again Sports, Papa John’s Pizza, Golden Chopstix and Rocky’s Barber Shop.
Hudson Plaza will lose that building to the construction project but it will gain a new look from a make-over of the facade on the main building and landscaping along Hwy. 85.
As for the main building that houses Michael’s and Radio Shack, Bonner said it will receive a facade make-over that will be similar in design to the Braelinn and Aberdeen Village shopping centers in Peachtree City.
The new facade will bring aesthetic changes with decorative piping along the roof line and a covered walkway along the front of the building,” Bonner said. And though still conceptual in nature, Bonner said there is the potential for as yet unidentified landscaping along with the addition of a monument sign fronting Hwy. 85.
Bonner said the project is expected to close in the spring, followed by the existing tenants in the smaller building relocating around summer. The new look of the shopping center is expected to be completed sometime in the fall.
Hudson Plaza is named for the late Leon Hudson, also the namesake of a shopping center bearing his family’s name in his hometown of Fairburn. Built in the late 1960s, Fayetteville’s Hudson Plaza has the distinction of being the first shopping center in the city. And back in those days the traffic along highways 85 and 92 was the center of everything when it came to shopping, Bonner said, adding that the area still today is a center of heavy traffic activity.
“It was an excellent location then and it’s an excellent location now,” Bonner said.
The roadway project that will link Hwy. 92 and Hood Avenue to the new Kathi Avenue Extension and on to North Jeff Davis Drive is designed to help ease the flow of traffic through the downtown area a few blocks away and provide a simplified routing of traffic in and around the immediate downtown area.
The project carries an estimated price tag of $9.1 million, with $7.8 million coming from previously collected local 1-cent sales tax revenues.
The roadway project could potentially go out for bid in January 2013 and be completed by mid-2014.
