Safeway christens Fairwood Green center

Store includes gas station; more businesses expected to open soon

Thursday, Dec. 14, 2006

The Fairwood Green shopping center’s first tenant – a Safeway supermarket – opened its doors last week and the center’s management company promises several more stores will open soon.

The shopping center is located at the town center of the Fairwood community, located just outside Bowie city limits on Annapolis Road.

Howard Biel of Faison, the developer of Fairwood Green, said, ‘‘a series of tenants will follow suit” but was not ready to disclose the names of the companies. However, a sign near the shopping center lists a PNC Bank and a World’s Gym as future tenants.

The tenants are expected to include a bank, dry cleaner, hair salon and a few restaurants clustered around a green common area. Biel said more tenants would be announced around Dec. 25.

‘‘It will be a center designed not only to serve the Fairwood community, but also the surrounding neighborhoods,” Biel said. ‘‘It’s not meant to be a regional center like Bowie Town Center ... but more on a community scale designed to the closer population. We will still provide quality services that residents will need.”

A ‘‘community scale” shopping center is what Fairwood developers and city officials had in mind when designing the residential community of 1,800 homes.

Fairwood’s developer, General Growth Properties (formerly known as the Rouse Company), is employing a similar design used in its pinnacle project, the city of Columbia – a large residential community enveloping a town center catering to basic needs, such as food, banking and gas. The idea is to cut down commuting outside of the neighborhood for basic needs.

The Fairwood Green shopping center sits in what is considered the neighborhood center. Just south of the center is Fairwood’s community center, playgrounds and common area. North of the shopping center is slated for a soccer park to be built by the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission.

‘‘[The shopping center] is a critical component to the overall development, and we’re very excited about it,” said Mark Thompson, a vice president with General Growth in charge in Fairwood. ‘‘We’re pleased with it, and I believe this shopping center offers a range of amenities that will have our residents staying in the community rather than clogging up the roads.”

The Safeway store is not on the grand scale seen at Bowie Town Center, which has the company’s largest store on the East Coast. Greg TenEyck, director of public relations for Safeway, said the Fairwood Green store is a prototypical store, maxing out at 56,000 square feet, and is the same blueprint used at all new stores.

‘‘We believe this is a growing part of the community with a lot of opportunity,” TenEyck said. ‘‘We build our grocery stores around a lot of rooftops, and the store will be just the right size to cater to the community.”

City officials and residents were concerned that with a new Safeway opening at Fairwood, the Safeway at the Marketplace – about four miles east on Annapolis Road – would close. However, TenEyck said there no current plans to close down any Safeway store in the surrounding area.

The Fairwood Safeway will be unique to the county as it is the first with a gas station, according to company officials. Safeway currently has several stores with fuel stations in southern Maryland.

E-mail Jason Flanagan at jflanagan@gazette.net.