All within less than two acres.
"The neighborhood will have 24 hours a day, seven days a week of traffic, noise, and bright lights," says Sharon Appalucci, 61, who lives less than 200 feet from what will be the main entrance to the Wawa parking lot.
Maureen Romero, 36, who with Appalucci has helped organize neighborhood opposition, puts it this way: "We're talking about our quality of life."
It's also a fact of life in older suburbs throughout South Jersey and the Philadelphia area. Wawa, drugstore chains such as CVS, and other retail chains are propelling the transformation of many outmoded, relatively low-density commercial areas adjacent to neighborhoods.
"Haddonfield Road is a significant economic-development corridor . . . and these redevelopment projects are going to continue," says longtime professional planner Ed Fox.
"Cherry Hill should be and has been preparing for that," adds Fox, who lives in Collingswood. "It's been this way since the racetrack was built in 1942."
In the last five years, the track site has been reborn as an enormous residential and shopping complex, much of it along Haddonfield Road. And a mile and a half north is the former Cherry Hill Toyota complex, where Wawa wants to build.
"It's a good redevelopment of a site that would have sat there," says Peter Gilligan, vice president of real estate for Wawa.
Tracing its roots to South Jersey and headquartered in Media, the chain operates nearly 600 stores in five states, including New Jersey.
Wawa, Gilligan says, has "a long practice, and history, of listening to people. . . . They're going to be our neighbors and we hope to have them as our customers."
He notes the company already has revised the proposed parking lot to prevent customers from turning left onto Yale Avenue. Lights also will be shielded and landscaping increased to mitigate the impact on neighboring homes.
