Chattanooga: Neighborhood theater site becomes Rite Aid

Jul 16, 2008 (Chattanooga Times/Free Press - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- RAD | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating -- Betty Back has lived all of her 73 years in the Highland Park neighborhood. She was born there, raised her children there and plays with her grandchildren along the neighborhood's streets.

She remembers that not long after she and her husband, John, who died in 1998, were married, the couple would walk from their house on Union Avenue to see shows at the Park Theatre a few blocks away.

"It made it real convenient for us," Mrs. Back said.

The Park Theatre sat at the corner of McCallie and Willow avenues for more than 80 years, serving as the center of activity for the children who grew up there in the 1940s and 1950s.

Earlier this month, the building that housed the theater was taken down to make way for a 14,673 square-foot Rite Aid.

The drugstore will replace the older store that sits just across Willow at 2010 McCallie Ave. Dick Davis, who owns the building of the existing Rite Aid, said he plans to redevelop that site and is talking to businesses about locating there.

The Rite Aid, which is set to open in March, will serve a need still evident in the area, said Mike Baggett of Newton, Oldacre and McDonald, a Nashville-based shopping center development company that bought the property in 2007.

"We're glad to be in that neighborhood," Mr. Baggett said. "It will be nice for the neighborhood."

The existing store has been a good store for Rite Aid, but he said it just makes sense for the company to update the stores when it can.

Businesses such as Sam Raider Co., a company selling fireplaces, occupied the theater building over the years.

But for the men and women who grew up nearby, their memories are of a place where children and teenagers once gathered on Saturday afternoons to watch matinees of "The Three Stooges" or short Westerns.

After they watched the cowboys and Indians, many of the boys went home and re-enacted scenes they'd seen on the big screen, said David Parker, 67, now a Nashville attorney, who grew up in the neighborhood. He is writing a book about the neighborhood.

He recalls growing up with the children in the Highland Park neighborhood during the 1940s and 1950s as being nearly idyllic. So many children lived in Highland Park during those years that each block could have had its own baseball team, he said.

Mr. Parker grew up a block away from the theater, where he saw Andy Griffith in "No Time for Sergeants" and Charlton Heston in "The Ten Commandments."

"We had a wonderful childhood," Mr. Parker said. "It was really a good neighborhood."

But over the years the neighborhood changed and longtime businesses left. The theater stopped showing movies some time in the late 1950s, Mr. Parker said. It reopened in the 1964 as a dinner theater, but closed again in 1966.

For those like Mrs. Back, who still live there, the investment by Rite Aid is a good sign.

"We need something -- it seems like everything moved out and left us," Mrs. Back said.

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