Tag: kohls

It looks like work is finally starting on the long-proposed Riverwood shopping center in Douglas County. This center is located at Hwy 395 and Topsy Lane, on the southeast corner. It was first announced back in 2002 or 03 when the Carson Valley Plaza across the street was built, and has had several false starts and stops. The last firm news I heard about it was in May of 2007, when they annouced Kohl's as a tenant and said they would open in October of 2008. Well, they were right about October, but it was the groundbreaking, not the opening, that would be happening then.

Some very large tractors, bulldozers and earthmovers arrived on the scene last week, and started to make quick work of clearing off the sagebrush from the land. This photo above was taken on Saturday, after only about one day of work, and you can see the progress they made in that short time. I went by today to check out their progress again, and they were halfway up the hill.

Now, clearing off the sagebrush isn't all they need to do. This site is on a hill, so they're going to have to flatten things out, just like they did with the Carson Valley Plaza. If I remember right, they spent weeks moving dirt around just to get the site level before they could even think of putting in utilities and grading foundations. So the tractors aren't going anywhere for a while, and I also have to question why they're starting this job in October, when the first snows have already fallen and winter is threatening to hit hard in just a short number of weeks. Maybe they want to get all the earthmoving out of the way now, because that's something they can do in cold weather, then when things start warming up in the spring they'll be set.

This is the same corner where Jethro's Casino is supposed to be built, if they can ever stop arguing about the sign and just get things done. But the casino is going to be built further up the hill. So this work might actually answer a nagging question of mine, exactly where the dividing line between shopping center and casino is going to be. We'll see how far up the hill they go with the bulldozers, and that should settle the question nicely.

Photo of the proposed site for Riverwood.

The "Riverwood" shopping center has been an on-again-off-again project for years now. This is the shopping center that's going to be built in Douglas County at Topsy Lane, right across the highway from Best Buy and the Carson Valley Plaza. Originally it was going to be built by AIG Baker, the same developer who built the Carson Valley Plaza. But then they backed out of the deal. Later on it was picked up again by Riverwood Redevelopment LLC, which is owned by Jay Timon, who is a former employee of who? AIG Baker. So I guess he's pretty determined to get Riverwood off the ground, and now he's confident enough to start announcing a couple of the big anchor stores. And the biggest by far is Kohl's, the major department store that recently had been rumored to be moving in to the old Kmart building at the north end of town. I guess that deal fell through, or it really was a rumor, because they sound pretty sure of themselves that they'll break ground for Kohl's this fall, and be open by October 2008. This store is supposed to even be a smidge bigger than the one they opened a couple of years ago in south Reno, so I don't know how we rate.

The other retailer announced is Sportsman's Warehouse, which I'm not a sportsman so that doesn't really get my skin tingling. Kohl's doesn't get my skin tingling either, except to know that my wife will probably be making weekly pilgrimages to the place, so it's going to be a part of my life no matter what. And of course where you have major anchor stores, you also get a lot of other, smaller places clustering around, and a lot of the time those stores end up being more interesting than the anchors anyway. So things look like they're set to take off at Riverwood this year, so we'll have to keep an eye on it.

This is also right next door to the land where Jethro recently announced he wants to build his casino. And luckily the article was written by the Record Courier, not the Nevada Appeal, so there is none of the teeth-gnashing that inevitably gets inserted into their articles about how Douglas County is "stealing" these stores from Carson City. Instead we get teeth-gnashing about how the county is giving tax breaks to the developer to build the shopping center. So pick your controversy, I guess.