By Zoe Adams
Baltimore Watchdog Staff Writer
The planned opening of an El Salto Mexican Restaurant in Perry Hall Square later this year represents another step forward for a 50-year-old shopping center that had fallen on hard times in recent years.
The 5,000-square-foot eatery will join Rite Aid, Outback Steakhouse, Dollar Tree and Village Gem as tenants in the 36-store shopping center on Belair and Ebenezer roads.
The center has benefited from the creation in 2011 of the Perry Hall Revitalization District, a special county business designation that provides various incentives for businesses to move in and fill the many empty store fronts that once existed there. Before the district was created, the shopping center had fallen on bad times with high vacancy rates.
“Within two years of the creation of the district, the occupancy rate at Perry Hall Square had gone from 60 to 90 percent,” said County Councilman David Marks, R-Fifth District, who was instrumental in getting the business district started.
Changes have not only been made to Perry Hall Square, the oldest shopping center in the area, Marks said. He said the positive change has also occurred at the struggling Regester Square.
“CVS Pharmacy, El Salto restaurant, Seasons Pizza, and T-Mobile are a few of the businesses that have come into the district,” Marks said.
According to county documents, the Perry Hall Revitalization District program provides businesses with low interest loans, architectural services, streetscape improvements, grants for district-wide improvements, tax credits and regulatory assistance. The county also provides an “Architect-On-Call” program in which business can get assistance with blueprints.
The revitalization district originally stretched from Blakely Avenue to Minte Drive along the Belair Road corridor and from Seven Courts Drive to Belair Road along the Joppa Road corridor, according to county documents.
It’s not only new businesses that are benefitting from the program. The Perry Hall Animal Hospital, for example, added landscaping and expanded its facility.
Marks said he is continuing to look for other areas that could be included in the district as a way of bringing more businesses to the county.
“At my suggestion, the district was extended to include the former Mars supermarket, so we could induce a tenant,” Marks said.
Other residents noticed the vacancy just 4 miles south on Belair Road at Silver Spring Shopping Center when Mars supermarket closed, and it affected the Perry Hall community. It changed the way Tracy Bradford, a Perry Hall resident, had to do her grocery shopping.
“I shopped at Mars. The main thing I liked about a grocery store being there, other than closeness to home, was that if I needed to get out when it snowed, I didn’t have to travel on main roads or very far to get there,” Bradford said. “We all have had to find other places to grocery shop. Many of those stores are large and more expensive. It’s harder on the elderly to have to shop in larger grocery stores.”
Residents are hopeful that another grocery store will replace the vacancy where the old Mars used to be.
Chip Hooper, a former Perry Hall resident, worked in the shopping center about 10 years ago. Many stores have come and gone since then, he said, but a few have stayed the same.
A video game exchange store once existed, as well as Hollywood Video, where he used to work. Those places are long gone, he said, and the shopping center has become more vacant since.
“I don’t like to see it [the shopping center] so bare. I think it had to do with the economy,” Hooper said.
Perry Hall Square is expected to be renovated, and vacancies will be filling up.
“Atlantic Realty Companies is investing at least $2 million to upgrade the 55-year-old shopping center, the oldest in Perry Hall,” Marks said in a Facebook post. “I can also confirm that El Salto restaurant has signed a lease to occupy space at the shopping center, one of several new tenants expected at the retail center.”
This is good news, according to Lynn Richardson, vice president of the Perry Hall-White Marsh Business Association. In the eight years that this district has existed, she said, not too much has been done aside from new signage and landscaping.
“Having a revitalization district is a start, but it hasn’t made a huge impact on this area over the last eight years,” Richardson said. “The problem is that [businesses] are severely limited by the fact that to be qualified, you must own the building.”
Richardson noted that the district is heading in the right direction, but the process is a slow one, and it is in a bit of a transitional process right now.
“There are things in the works from the business association standpoint to help businesses start to fill the vacant spaces,” Richardson said.
Richardson has she hopes the community will be able to grow in the upcoming years, adding that this same process took place at Timonium Square.
“The health of these communities can get there if we use the tools they have available,” Richardson said. “[Business owners] have nothing to lose by using these programs.”
El Salto restaurant is expected to be opening around May 5th, according to a Facebook post by Marks.