Bummed out as I’m sitting at the Starbucks inside this newly constructed Target, on Trueman Boulevard in Hilliard. Just watching the traffic zip up and down this fairly inconsequential street is enough to give me a bad case of the blues, thinking how it was deserted just a handful of months ago, and that the relentless march of progress cannot be stopped.
Before wrongly accused of hypocrisy – I’m guilty of biting the hand from which my food is delivered, sure, but not hypocrisy – let me state for the record that I work here. I sit at one of these tables every morning that I’m scheduled, for breaks and lunch, at these windows facing the street. And while watching interiors of cities as they are transformed and repurposed can be a thing of beauty, a marvel to hold up to the light and admire, something about plowing that which was formerly frontier will always bring out the inner treehugger, somehow, even when one wasn’t entirely sure such an inner voice existed. And I’m sure that with or without my presence, this Target would continue to exist.
Since the Target went up, they’ve built another strip mall on this road already, in between the Home Depot and Cheeseburgers In Paradise. A Radio Shack sits there, who knows what else. And of course this line of concrete shopping options will likely extend north clear up to Davidson Road, soon enough, where Trueman truly ends. In time, who knows, I can see Trueman being expanded until at least Hayden Run. As will Britton someday, too, Trueman’s vaguely parallel counterpart on the other side of the I-270 outerbelt.
Such developments are tolerable when population and lack of space demands it. But sometimes you can’t escape feeling certain acres are bulldozed specifically because they are new, because formerly occupied plots are considered passe. Such as, one other restaurant sitting across the outerbelt, one of those carbon copy “western” steakhouses (I can’t keep them straight, can’t remember which franchises I’ve frequented and which I haven’t as they all look exactly the same), sits deserted, it has been for a couple of years now. Texas Roadhouse was lined out the building when I was dating a girl in this neck of the woods eight years ago, but at present there’s nary a soul dining there. And a Chili’s just closed at this exit as well, demolished and replaced by another goddamn CVS – a development which would otherwise be deplorable, except that I happen to kind of respect that they at least used an existing retail space rather than dropping a bomb in some field on the edge of town. All of these establishments existed along a busy corridor, Cemetery Road, which is itself an exit off of I-270, yet none of those could survive. And even so, they’re still building a bunch of new restaurants along this stretch? I guess the failure of past tenants explains why movers and shakers involved with some of these newer companies declined to take over shuttered locations, but I wonder what makes them feel so confident about their own demographic studies and carefully razed coordinates.
II.
Okay, so the above was written in either 2005 or 2006, i.e. roughly 20 years ago. But what does this area look like now? A couple of these I already know off the top of my head: Cheeseburger In Paradise? Completely toast. Radio Shack? This one is toast as well. The Home Depot, however, survives. And while the Target still looks refreshingly modern on the outside, its exterior, in an opinion probably influenced by the relative emptiness of their parking lot (even at rush hour on a Friday afternoon), makes me think that this location was never of the company’s top performing outposts.
It seemed totally apparent, when this Target was built, that the Trueman Blvd corridor would immediately blow up with all manner of retail and traffic. And while it seems this is eventually coming, it’s somewhat refreshing that it still has not done so as of this writing. As it stands, this store is in a funky, out of the way spot that is almost counterintuitive now, one that you wouldn’t just stumble upon in your travels without looking it up on a map app first.
Farther north, there are some isolated businesses here and there, and of course this TruePointe development is coming. For the time being, though, a surprising lack of development marks much of the rest – which I would not have bet any money on, twenty years after I sat out that window looking at this road.
