By: Richard Hyatt, Richard Hyatt's Columbus, www.richardhyattcolumbus.com

An old shopping center
raises new questions
along Macon Road as
more vacant storefronts
plague Cross Country
Plaza and the rapidly
changing section
of Columbus, Ga.
that sits across from it.

(First in a series)

Boys who lived on nearby streets pedaled their bicycles through the parking lot if the shopping center like it was a neighborhood sidewalk — and in many ways Cross Country Plaza was an extension of the comfortable neighborhoods that the boys and their families called home.

This was the 1950s and this was Columbus, Ga.  ...  a slow-moving textile town without an interstate highway ... where city and county governments operated out of a single courthouse  ...  where the minor league baseball team was the Cardinals  ...  and where white and black children attended public schools that were separate but far from equal.

Parents of the boys on those bikes still remembered the land on which the shopping center was built when it was a swamp with grass up to here, when it was it was outside the city limits and when Macon Road was a two-lane road cutting through the pastures of Mr. Wells' Dairy Farm. A natural spring ran through the property and its water was cold and pure. Alongside of the undeveloped land was bubbling Lindsay Creek.

Those 62.5 acres were owned by Edward Wellington Swift Jr. The president of Colonial Realty and Insurance Company, he was a businessman from an old Columbus family that didn’t always walk in step with his conservative contemporaries. Most of his peers were happy with life the way it was in their home town. Swift couldn’t help but think about life the way it could be. He built some of the city’s first condominiums and in the early 1950s talked of developing a suburban shopping center with space for retail stores, offices and apartments.

Wellington Plaza it was to be called. Swift talked about one-stop shopping with free parking, places to eat and places you could have your automobile serviced while you browsed. He wanted it to be enclosed, with air-conditioning. Swift promised the city’s first regional shopping center.

It opened with a flourish on May 10, 1956.

Ed Swift delivered most of the things he dreamed about except for the name and the attached roof. Cross Country Plaza, it became, losing Swift’s family name. It cost about $4 million to build in 1950 dollars, and local people were skeptics, wondering if Swift would ever recoup his investment so far from Broadway — the downtown street where Columbus had always conducted business.

Would people really drive way out in the country just to shop?

Shoppers did come, of course. In droves. So did a larger shopping mall. So did popular department stores with familiar names. So did a suburban movie house. His shopping center , though successful in its own right, was the pioneer in a section of town that in the years that followed was the city’s retail center.

Time brings questions

Now, 52 years later, many storefronts in Cross Country are vacant and others are sure to follow. No longer will parents from those adjacent neighborhoods allow their children to ride their bikes unattended. A new wave of stores has moved into the shopping center.

A multi-million dollar public library sits nearby. An expensive school administration building and a city service center are coming soon where Sears & Roebuck once sold sporting goods by J.C. Higgins and appliances by Kenmore.

Such changes have spurred a new set of questions about what the future holds for Cross Country Plaza and the unusual mix of properties it fronts across Macon Road.