Barnes & Noble underway; Ruby Tuesday looms

By DAVE HAMRICK
Staff Writer

Construction has begun on the Barnes and Noble shopping center at Ga. Highway 85 north and Pine Trail Road, with completion targeted for May 2000.

Fayetteville's Planning Commission last week started preliminary discussions of how a Ruby Tuesday's restaurant planned for the project will look, and is expected to act on another key component of developers' plans for the Uptown Square shopping center next week.

Development plans for an access road through Fayette Promenade, a 30-acre shopping center planned next door to the Barnes and Noble site, are on the commission's agenda for Tuesday at 7:30 p.m.

In approving plans for Uptown Square earlier this year, City Council included a condition that a joint access road connect the two shopping centers, and tie into a traffic light in front of the Promenade site, across Hwy. 85 from the northern entrance to Home Depot.

Funds currently are unavailable for increasing the traffic capacity of roads like Hwy. 85 due to air quality compliance problems, and Fayetteville officials have grown increasingly adamant in recent months that any new shopping centers and office complexes be connected through a network of access roads to reduce their traffic impact on the highways.

Officials insisted on the shared access road for Promenade and Uptown, and hope the two new centers can eventually be connected with Guthrie Plaza to the north.

Chuck Arnod, who will design the new Ruby Tuesday's, told commissioners last week he wants their input “before I spend $50,000 designing it.”

Standard plans for the chain's restaurants won't work in Fayetteville, commissioners told him. A scaled down version, with lighting on a “more pedestrian scale” would be more acceptable, they said.

Shutters instead of bright awnings, a green roof instead of red, and architecture to match the shopping center all would help smooth the path to approval, commissioners said.

Arnod promised to put together a design tailored to Fayetteville's exacting standards.