Big Box

By the end of rush hour Monday, the aisles at the big Target on City Avenue near the ramps to I-76 East were waking up - boxed pizzas getting restocked, gaps in the Great Wall of Soda being meticulously plugged. That groceries are part of the big-box experience these days is hardly news. Wal-Mart has been up to it for years now, even boasting an organic section. But over the weekend Target (now with more than 30 outlets locally) sent out mailers saying it was upping its own ante, offering a fresh "handpicked selection of meat, produce and baked goods.

When Nick Q. Lee took delivery of a box yesterday at his South Street clothing shop, he started getting the hangers ready. But instead of a shipment of pants or flashy shirts, the box contained an estimated 25 pounds of nasty-smelling marijuana. "I said, 'What it is?' " Lee, 30, said in an interview in the store, Lee International Inc. After he opened the shipment and cut open a big plastic bag inside, he first thought someone had mistakenly sent an order of flowers and seed.

Picture a Home Depot parking lot on a rainy Saturday. Traffic clogs feeder roads as shoppers queue up to dash in for paint, nails or fluorescent lightbulbs. Customers wade through ponds created on the endless plain of asphalt. Runoff fouls streams. Big-box retailers are convenient for shoppers - but hard on the land. They generally sit on huge lots on the edge of towns near freeway interchanges. Open space disappears as development sprouts on adjoining property. Traffic snarls: A single superstore can generate as many as 10,000 car trips a day. Soon, storm sewers have difficulty keeping up with the volume.

Editor's note: This four-part series on problems with "big box" retailing is the first fruits of a yearlong Editorial Board focus on the interwoven issues of sprawl and blight, of preserving open space and renewing urban communities. Urban blight - you know what that looks like: Empty factories pocked with broken windows. Boarded-up homes, empty lots strewn with trash. Lonely retailers struggling to survive in between empty storefronts covered in graffiti. In Philadelphia, Mayor Street wants to spend $250 million to clear such scenes from his city, to stop the spiral.

Third of four parts Constructing his flagship store in 1904, John Wanamaker created a 12-story emporium that dazzled Philadelphians with its 15-foot ceilings and intricate decor. Over the years, however, the store proved too big to remain profitable. One by one, upper floors were converted into offices. Today, Lord & Taylor occupies the first three floors at 13th and Market Streets with 1 million square feet of office space above it. The Wanamaker building evolved over time as the market dictated.

Making Wal-Mart - the national chain known for its one-stop shopping - split into parts, as the township supervisors here voted to do, is unprecedented for "big box" stores, experts in retailing said yesterday. At a meeting Monday night, the supervisors voted, 3-2, to allow Wal-Mart to build in this rural area of southern Chester County. But they added a twist: The 134,000-square-foot store - proposed for the northeast corner of Route 1 and School House Road - must be divided into a minimum of three buildings, which must be separated by at least 50 feet.

A controversial proposed Wal-Mart store can come to the township, but the company must meet strict conditions that will help preserve the area's rural character, the supervisors said last night. At a packed meeting in the township building, the supervisors voted, 3-2, to allow the first "big box" store in southern Chester County, but with a twist. One of the conditions stipulates that the "big box" take the form of three smaller buildings. "I have found that the rural lifestyle that was available here was something that I particularly loved . . .," said Supervisors Chairman Richard P.S. "Buzz" Hannum, who has lived in the township all his life.

The Marple Crossroads Shopping Center, riddled by corporate-bankruptcy vacancies, will soon be home to a major new tenant. But its chance for revival has sparked community controversy, as some fear the heavy price the retailer may bring. After talks over the last year, Wal-Mart recently signed a lease with the shopping center's management to open a 110,000-square-foot store, possibly by late 2011. The store will fill vacancies left behind by bankrupt retailers Circuit City and Linens 'n Things.

The Rev. Rob Tarnoviski has shucked many of his ties from the past. His suits and dress shirts, too. When he presides at church services these days, his Sunday best is likely to be blue jeans and a T-shirt. It's one of many ways "Pastor Rob" has broken out of the box of his Baptist upbringing in an effort to reach today's motley religious seekers. Now, he is leading his nondenominational flock into a big box of a wholly different kind. Next month, Bethel Fellowship Community Church will move into a freestanding, 10-screen cineplex at Franklin Mills Mall in the Far Northeast.

They're two very little words with very big consequences: "big boxes. " At 100,000 square feet or larger, they're the newest breed of megastores, so big they have their own gravitational field. When they plop down in a retail district, everyone feels a pull. Tax-hungry officials welcome them, seeing new ratables for their shrinking budgets. But neighbors - residents and traditional retailers alike - groan that "there goes the neighborhood. " And now, there's a whole string of big boxes lining up half a mile away from the Deptford Mall.

Manhattan was crawling with retailers and real estate brokers licking their wounds from the economic collapse when Steve Niggeman, a member of that chastened club, took a seat at a restaurant and floated a proposal that, at its core, screamed, "Spend millions. " The annual International Council of Shopping Centers conference, typically an orgy of deal making between landlords and retail tenants, was in town. But on Dec. 8, 2008, the mood was somber. Chrysler and GM were running out of cash, Circuit City had gone bankrupt, unemployment was about to surge.

Cherry Hill has lifted a ban that prevented grocery and big-box stores from selling liquor, expanding the field of potential bidders when it auctions a new liquor license next month. The change, approved Monday night by the township council, has drawn protests from liquor-store owners, who say they will be driven out of business by chain supermarkets. "This is basically our whole livelihood," said Rich Brooks, who owns Benash Liquors on Route 38. "This is just an SKU [stock-keeping unit]

Reprinted from Thursday's editions. Safe Haven , the latest film adaptation from romance writer Nicholas Sparks ( Dear John , Message in a Bottle ), opens on a dark, stormy night in Boston. A young woman bursts out of a house, running. She fights her way through the heavy rain, running, always running, as police cars, lights and sirens wailing, follow. The runner is Katie, an elegant, slim, troubled, haunted woman whose distress, fear, and anxiety are palpable.

During gift-giving season in the digital age, boxed sets are absurdly anachronistic - and more essential than ever. Sure, it's ridiculous to lust after doorstop-sized consumer goods when the sounds therein could easily fit on a flash drive the size of your fingernail. But then what are you going to give the music lovers in your life who need to hold a tangible treasure come the holidays? Boxes cater to obsessives, and there's always more in the vaults. This year, there are a number of sets in which a single classic album has been padded with extras to fill a box, including the Michael Jackson Bad set reviewed here, as well as sets dedicated to The Velvet Underground & Nico and The Beach Boys' Smile . The concomitant trend is to compile absolutely everything an artist recorded for a label in one foreboding package.

THE MACHINE holding the most danger for the city is not, as some might think, the political machine. It's the wayback machine - that contraption that whooshes us to the past and ensures that we never do things any different from how we have for years. Over the past few years, the city has avoided a fair number of trips to the past - approving a new zoning code for example, was significant step into the future - although thanks to the wayback machine we still enjoy such relics as walking-around money, patronage jobs, backroom deal-making, a corrupted property-tax system and a paucity of women in elected office, to name just a few. We were dismayed when the ghost of the wayback machine emerged a few weeks ago, with the approval of high-rise housing projects on the Delaware River waterfront that are counter to well-crafted guidelines for waterfront development that make up the central Delaware master plan.

TOLEDO, Ohio - Pushed to the bottom of the toy box by video games and other high-tech gadgets, Etch A Sketch is suddenly drawing lots of attention, thanks to a gaffe that has shaken up the race for the White House. Ohio Art Co., maker of the classic baby-boomer toy, is sending a big box of Etch A Sketches to the presidential campaigns to say thanks for the publicity and a boost in sales. It all started when Mitt Romney strategist Eric Fehrnstrom was asked Wednesday about the candidate's politics now vs. this fall, and he likened the campaign to an Etch A Sketch, saying, "You can kind of shake it up and we start all over again.

Pentimenti Gallery regular Steven Baris continues to study and interpret the elasticity and ambiguity of the exurban landscape and its big-box architecture in his recent geometric paintings on canvas and Mylar, and his painted Plexiglas wall sculptures. In particular, his large oil paintings on canvas, showing diagrammatic outlines floating in milky atmospheres, express the banality and soullessness of the exurbs. Baris also has created an installation for the gallery's Project Room, "Exurban Archipelago," that includes a video of a distribution center that appears to have been shot by Baris through the windows of a moving car; it captures the facility's anonymous contours to a T. Baris' work is nicely complemented by Kim Beck's large graphite drawings, in which she reorganizes the typical suburban and exurban landscape into complex compositions with cutouts.

THE GRAMMYS are that annual lovefest when the music industry tries to convince the rest of the world that it still has a pulse. But you know what showed a surprising heartbeat yesterday? The movie industry. For the first time since Christmas 2008, four - count 'em, four - movies opened with more than a $20 million box-office haul. "The Vow" led the way with a ridiculous $41.7 million. Who knew so many people would remember to see a movie about amnesia? In second, with $39.3 million, according to yesterday's studio estimates, was the Denzel Washington-Ryan Reynolds ' action thriller "Safe House.

Seven years after the Pennsauken Mart was slated for demolition, to be replaced with a hockey arena and convention center that never materialized, Camden County officials say construction of a residential development on the site should begin by early summer. Renaissance Walk, a 600-unit complex that hopes to attract "young, urban professionals," is expected to begin occupancy in 2013 on land where an eclectic group of vendors hawked pretzels, used clothes, pets, and low-cost wares in the dilapidated indoor market.