A look back at Petaluma's first shopping center

This year marks the 40th anniversary of Petaluma's first shopping center. In view of the fact that there is such a whoopdedoo about enlarging our retail base hereabouts, it might just be worth taking a look back to that time when this town got its first shopping center.

First, it is worthwhile looking at Petaluma in 1970. The town was undergoing an unprecedented growth surge, but local retailers were slow in keeping up. Downtown was a dreary place, with fine Victorian building facades hidden behind mid-1900s efforts of prettifying.

There was not a large-size supermarket in Petaluma to serve a city of more than 20,000 people — the largest were Purity Market and Roger Wilco, which today house Petaluma Market and Whole Foods, and a Safeway superette where today's Staples parking lot is. Safeway was in a small strip that included a drug store, a real estate office and a hamburger stand named Harvey's.

Retail leakage (shopping dollars going out of town) was about as bad then as it is now, with Santa Rosa and Marin grabbing a large slice of our town's retail sales dollar. So it was with a fair bit of anticipation that the first center opened. It was then called the Petaluma Plaza, and constituted roughly the southern half of today's Plaza Shopping Center, or what is known as Plaza South.

The leading stores, either on opening day or within a couple of years, were Albertson's, the first full-size market in town, W. T. Grant's department store, Walgreen Drugs, Straw Hat Pizza, Wells Fargo Bank, TG&Y (a small version of a Woolworth's five and dime), Winston Tires, Imperial Savings, Fireside Books, a handful of small chain clothing stores, and a deli called Graziano's International Gourmet, run by the fellow whose fine downtown Italian restaurant is now a landmark.

The next decade was a flurry of retail development activity. First off, Washington Square a block away from the Plaza was developed, with a full-sized Safeway (though quite a bit smaller than today's store). In the mid-'70s, Golden Eagle Shopping Center was built, with Alpha Beta as the anchor store supermarket. About the same time, Lucky Market was built on Petaluma Boulevard North.

The next step, in the late '70s, was the construction of Plaza North (under ownership separate from Plaza South) with Kmart and Longs as the two major anchors. It was also to be the home of Sizzler restaurant (how soon we forget). Because of Sizzler, Petaluma was featured in Herb Caen's column in the San Francisco Chronicle.

As it was, our local columnist Bill Soberanes wrote an item to the fact that Petaluma was becoming the gourmet capital of the North Bay because we were getting a Sizzler. Caen rubbed it in pretty well.

But, in the past 30 years, retail development has been less aggressive and sometimes more controversial. The development with Orchard Hardware on North McDowell, the Gateway Center on Lakeville, the Kohl's center on McDowell and the center with G&G Market on Sonoma Mountain Parkway have pretty much completed our traditional shopping center offerings.

Two other projects generated plenty of heat, a harbinger of things to come. The first was the factory outlets, bitterly fought, with the result that the development has never been completed as per original plans. The second was the auto mall, which created an outrage in certain sectors of this community particularly susceptible to outrage.

Looking back at the opening of the Plaza in 1970s, it is interesting to note that virtually all of the businesses operating downtown when the first shopping center opened are no longer in business. If you wanted to, you could draw a conclusion regarding the pervasive evils of the impact of chain stores.

However, then you need to look at the fact that almost every business that opened in the Plaza in 1970 is out of business as well. According to my records, only the barber shop and the dry cleaners have survived the 40 years.

Truth is, retail is a tough business, and not necessarily built to last. The shopper carries the whip and no matter what government might do to protect retail businesses, it is the shopper who decides retail's ultimate fate.

(Don Bennett, a business writer and consultant, has been involved with city planning issues since the early 1970s. He serves on the Sonoma County Planning Commission. His e-mail address is dcbenn@aol.com.)