WAL-MART RUMORS IN YORK, VA

Heads up for Wal-Mart [Virginia Gazette]

Chris Henderson laments that Presidents Park doesn’t get any respect. “It’s kind of the red-headed stepchild of the area’s attractions,” he said Tuesday.

Or perhaps the big-headed stepchild.

In any case, Henderson would like to form a group of local investors to save the park, which features giant busts of all 43 presidents.

It’s been on the block for just over a year. Haley Newman doesn’t want to sell it, but one of his co-owners died and the heirs want out.

Newman said Tuesday there have been a number of inquiries about buying the property. “But we don’t have a contract with anyone yet,” he said.

Wal-Mart is said by others to be eyeing the site. That would put stores at both intersections of I-64 and Route 199, and directly across from the troubled Marquis shopping center.

Henderson, a commercial real estate broker and a member of the James City County Planning Commission, said Presidents Park adds to the area. “I think it would be a shame to lose it for the sake of another big-box store.”

He’d like to see a group of local investors buy the park and possibly create a nonprofit foundation to run it. “Then it would have an educational mission.”

He suggested an interpretive area where great events in American history are re-created. “You could show presidents making the decision to get involved in World War I or World War II.”

Newman is all for that. “My loyalty is to Presidents Park,” he said.

He said business was up 20% last year, but didn’t disclose attendance figures. “We’re probably the only attraction that can say we’re up in July ’08 over last year,” he said.

“It hasn’t been the immediate success that I’d hoped for and the investors had hoped for when we opened,” he said. “But, looking back, it’s a lot like when I developed Water Country USA. It took several years for it to start to take off.”

Newman said there has been preliminary interest from a developer interested in creating a presidential themed hotel in conjunction with the park. Visitors could stay in the Lincoln bedroom, for example.

The initial asking price for Presidents Park was $4 million. The park and the adjacent Days Inn Water County, which is separately owned, both went on the market in June 2007.

The site was once planned for an ambitious mixed-used development called Whittakers Mill. That proposal in the early 1980s featured an amusement park, motels, a resort hotel, condos, restaurants, a theater, a campground and speciality stores. About 850 acres on the proposed Whittakers Mill site were sold to Anheuser-Busch in 1992, including Water Country.

Posted by Tony Calero on Wednesday, July 30, 2008

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