A New Adventure - rebuilding a food store

New Beginnings in Paducah This Blog is a long time getting started. In it I hope to build a chronicle of Bob and Helene Davis' conversion of a 1900 vintage brick grocery store into a combination of gallery, residence and two studios. My wife, Helene, is an Art Quilter and I am retired from a telecommunications research lab in New Jersey. We became interested in Paducah through the Artist Relocation Program in 2004. As it happened we didn't find the kind of property in the Lowertown section we were looking for back in 2004. We did, however, find a nice Cotswold Cottage Tudor style house in a good part of town that has an excellent basement that would serve as a temporary studio while we watched out for the place of our dreams. This house was built in the mid thirties by the owner of a local candy maker, Gilliam Candy. It has steel beams and poured concrete basement walls and floor and is a far cry from the usual musty furnace holes typical of many of the houses we saw in this area. It is truly a fine house but at only 2200 sq ft one the main floor and 1600 sq ft in the basement it not enough space for both Helene and I to do our things. We continued to look for a develop able building. Paducah has made a special commitment to the artist community especially in the Lowertown area. Recognizing that artists need work, living and show space in the same place, Paducah has made zoning possible for this kind of multi-use. Early in 2005 we bought a 5800 sq ft building in the heart of downtown exactly one block over from what is now the National Quilt Museum.

We thought this building at 215 Broadway had enough space for us, but after two sets of architectural plans it became apparent that the narrowness of the building (20 ft) and the need for a stairwell and elevator reduced the space available too much. In the fall of 2007 we bought the Maytag building at 12th st and Jefferson pictured at top. In the spring of 2008 we were approached by the developers of the new condos that back up to 215 Broadway and we sold it to them to convert to a store and luxury condominium project. So here I am the day we closed. This building began around 1900 as a pair of stores that were joined together to make a 46 by 80 foot building. Not much later a 60 foot addition was added to make a 46 x 140 foot store complex. It was best known as the Sloane Brothers Grocery in the 1920's. Monroe Sloane, whose father and uncle owned the store tells me this story. Sometime around 1927 the Sloane brothers were bought out by Piggly Wiggly Food stores. The brothers invested the money and in 1929 lost it in the market crash. Piggly Wiggly was bought out by Krogers and the building may have operated as a Kroger's store during the 1930's. In any event, the great flood of 1937 put water up about 6 ft in the building and it was used as an appliance store, warehouse and other things until disrepair and decay set in. From another neighbor I found out that in 2002 the building was renovated by the local Maytag franchise as their showroom. This renovation replaced the roof and floor for the front part of the building. Sometime around 2004 Maytag was bought by Whirlpool and the franchise was lost. For awhile the building housed a High Performance Auto parts shop run by the owner's grandson. When we bought the building It had been on the market for 3 years and I think the owner may have been just exhausted by the burden of the mortgage. In the next installments I'll review the before pictures and the planning and Blue print stages. Bob Davis