By DAVE HAMRICK
Staff Writer

Fayetteville's old A&T grocery building, vacant for two years, will soon come to life as an after-hours youth entertainment center called The Market.

“I've got a 17-year-old son and he just goes `out' on weekends,” said Taylor Williams of Fayetteville, a music marketer who is organizing the teen center along with a group of other professionals in the area. “What's `out'? It's just hanging out.”

Williams said he decided something needed to be done.

“The youth of today are just a mistake away from changing the rest of their lives,” he said. “We provide for them from preschool to junior high school and then release them to the world.

“I thought as a parent I needed to do something so there would at least be a place that they could go that would be smoke-free, alcohol-free, drug free, with four to six off-duty police officers there all the time, where we could control the type music — maybe we could influence them with a sense of belonging to something,” said Williams.

He hopes to open The Market toward the end of this month, with dancing Friday and Saturday nights. Part of the activity also will be to produce an “American Bandstand” style television show. “We're working on placement,” he said, adding that organizers of the club are hopeful that the show can be aired profitably.

Once teens are used to thinking of the club as a place to spend their time, Williams said he will begin offering more activities during the week, such as motivational speakers, mentor programs, antidrug programs and the like.

“Once they're coming there on Friday and Saturday, all we have to do is plug in different things,” he said.

He also is working with church youth groups and plans to offer the club as a meeting hall for youth groups, he said.

Though his work background is in marketing, not teen clubs, the concept is not new to Williams. He organized a teen club when he was 18 years old, because nothing like that was available where he lived, he said.

“I never thought about it again, until my son turned 17,” he said.