Sherwood’s North Hills Shopping Center needs a new tenant after PopATop North decided not to reopen in a new building there.
The first new construction in the North Hills Shopping Center at JFK and North Hills boulevards in Sherwood in decades is ready to lease.
Unfortunately, the liquor store for which the 5,280-SF building was built has backed out, so Stan Hastings, whose family owns the shopping center, is on the hunt for a new tenant — or four.
The building was designed to accommodate from one to four storefronts, but PopATop North Inc., Hastings Realty Co.’s longtime tenant across the parking lot, was expected to occupy the whole thing.
There were hoops to jump through.
PopATop North’s location was less than the legally required 1,000 feet from both a church and a school — Immaculate Conception Catholic Church and its associated elementary school — but it had been there so long that its license was grandfathered. The Alcoholic Beverage Control Board in August denied owner Dennis Davenport Jr.’s application to move the grandfathered license across the parking lot because the new location would be less than 600 feet from Immaculate Conception, a restriction in ABC regulations but not in the law.
But the old store was also less than 600 feet from the church and school, so Davenport and his lawyer, Hubert W. Alexander of Jacksonville, appealed the denial in Pulaski County Circuit Court. Since Immaculate Conception did not object to the relocation of the store a bit closer, nor did anyone else, Judge Chris Piazza ruled on Sept. 19 that the denial was arbitrary and capricious.
The old PopATop North closed around Halloween, Hastings said, and Davenport informed his landlord that he had changed his mind about reopening in the new building.
Ideally, Hastings would like for someone else to buy the PopATop North license and move right in. (Davenport’s father, Dennis Sr., sold the original PopATop Bottle Store at 1901 S. University Ave. in Little Rock to Jaswant Singh in August.)
But since the ABC didn’t think that even the same owner should be able to get a grandfathered license at a new location 412 feet from the church and school, getting such treatment for a new owner of PopATop North might present its own difficulties.
ABC Director Michael Langley described the situation as both unique and complex, and he said he didn’t know whether a buyer would be able to pick up where Davenport left off — especially since Davenport closed his store in the meantime.
“I don’t know if [a buyer] would be able to stand in his shoes or have to start the process over,” Langley said in an email to Whispers.
Alexander, the lawyer who represented Davenport, did not return a call seeking comment.
More to Come
Asbestos having been abated, the building that housed PopATop North will be coming down any day, Hastings said last week. It will be replaced with a brand-spanking-new branch of Eagle Bank & Trust, another of the Hastings family’s business ventures.
The new bank will replace the 1966 building on the east side of the North Hills Shopping Center footprint. Then the old bank will be razed as well.
Long-term plans call for another retail building in the center of the shopping center footprint.
“What we’d like to see is a mixed-use retail of some sort — a restaurant and some other kind of retail,” Hastings said. “We’d like it to have that good, neighborhood feel.”
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