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...Walking down into a damp, dark cave, Christi Sulzbach decided she was no Indiana Jones when a companion reported having seen a snake there on his last visit.
“You go ahead,” Sulzbach said. “I’ll stay right here on the stairs.”
But there was treasure ahead — not an ancient archaeological artifact waiting to be snatched, but the “cave” itself — the basement beneath Armuchee Village, the new name for the shopping center at 3361 Martha Berry Highway.
Sulzbach and her husband, Robert Bogle, saw potential for a 310-unit self-storage business in the long-neglected basement, part of their makeover of the strip shopping center that’s anchored by Food Lion and CVS. They bought the center in March 2007.
The couple started revitalizing the center soon after, first working on storefront facades and the parking lot, and hired Rome architect Robert Noble, who developed a hallway in the middle of the center.
“We needed to
Armuchee Village, located on Martha Berry Highway north of Mount Berry Square, is anchored by Food Lion and also is home to a CVS. By William T. Martin / RN-T |
show people it had life in it,” Sulzbach said.
They have invested “in excess of a million dollars” in improvements and in starting two other businesses besides the self-storage units: Rome Pack and Ship and Kangaroo Jake’s, a 19,500-square-foot indoor playground for children ages 2 to 12.
Click here for a previous story about Kangaroo Jake’s.
The center, just more than 100,000 square feet, has a total of eight tenants, new and old, and 10 spaces totaling 20,000 square feet available, according to Gene Meyer, general manager. “We have big hopes for a restaurant” at the south end of the center, a spot that would accommodate patio dining, Meyer said.
The other hope is for a full range of service-type businesses. “What we’re trying to be is a one-stop shop here,” he said.
“As soon as we bought the center, we started working with Floyd County and (the state department of transportation) to install a traffic light that will match up with the (Georgia State Patrol post) driveway” across the highway, Sulzbach said.
A corresponding driveway into the center will be built, and the driveway at the north end will be closed. Those changes will improve safety and also bring more customers into Armuchee Village, she said.
Impressive storage
While it’s not as cheerful or colorful or noisy as Kangaroo Jake’s, the basement self-storage facility is at least equally as impressive.
Billy Atkins, who developed the original shopping center with his father, Arthur, on family-owned land, recalls the first time the basement flooded decades ago. “We could not use it for a couple of months,” he said.
They built a dam and installed a pump, “which worked great” until Rome was hit with another flood-inducing storm just a few short years later. Lightning struck the pump, Atkins said, and the basement flooded a second time.
On initial inspection a year ago, there was standing water in the basement (and snakes), Meyer said. He doesn’t think it’ll happen again.
The basement now has “six pumps with three levels of redundancy, and two back-up generators.”
The self-storage units are also climate-controlled, have motion-activated lighting and video surveillance.
‘My heart melts’
It was a retirement that didn’t quite work out that led Sulzbach and Bogle to find a neglected shopping center in Armuchee from their home in Santa Barbara, Calif.
Sulzbach, a lawyer, and Bogle, a commercial real estate developer, “had somewhat retired,” she said, but inactivity didn’t suit them, so they started looking for commercial properties to buy and manage. They started in Dallas. Their research helped them decide they wanted their next property to also be in the South, and they starting focusing on a “submarket of Atlanta,” Sulzbach said, and they found Rome was just what they were looking for.
“The area is fairly self-contained. The health care is right here. And there’s going to be a growth in population in Armuchee,” Sulzbach said.
She said they plan to purchase a home in Floyd County and split their time between here and California.
“We’ve gotten to know some wonderful people. We’ve really fallen in love with the area,” she said. “I’m a farm girl at heart. Every time I drive by Berry College, my heart melts.”
