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'This was the place to shop': After 43 years, Cum-Park Plaza's owners sell Alamance County's first shopping center(Times-News (Burlington, NC) (KRT) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) Jul. 23--Alice Allen started work at Roses in Cum-Park Plaza the day after it opened in August 1963. The shopping center was Burling ton's first, preceding Holly Hill Mall (now Burlington Square Mall) by six years. There were few shopping centers of its size in North Carolina when Cum-Park opened with 28 stores and other businesses on North Church Street in Burlington. "It was exciting," Allen said. "Western Electric (which had a plant close by on Graham-Hopedale Road) was booming. There were a lot of people on this side of town. This shopping center was the place to shop. Fridays and Saturdays were just almost like a circus." People came from nearby towns such as Hillsborough, Siler City, Pittsboro, Reidsville, Eden and Danville, Va., to shop at Cum-Park. They would sometimes make a day-trip out of coming here to shop, making Cum-Park a smaller-scale version of the shopping destination Burlington Manufacturers Outlet Center became when it opened here in the early 1980s. Cum-Park Plaza got its name from the last names of Hugh Cummings and Carl Parks, the two businessmen who started planning for the center in 1960. There was a contest to name the shopping center, and a woman named Maude Wood won $500 for suggesting the name. After 43 years, the Cummings and Parks families have sold the shopping center. Cummings, for whom Cummings High School is named (he donated the land for the school) died in 1984. Parks and his family have managed the center's day-to-day operations since it opened. Cummings' widow, Rebecca, has also stayed involved, handling the finances. The two families began seriously looking for a buyer for Cum-Park about 10 months before the sale went through in June. The new owners, a group of CPAs who buy shopping centers as investments, haven't announced any plans for changes. Carl Parks and his son, Chris Parks, said they think the center will stay about the same. The purchase price was $6.8 million. "I was satisfied," Carl Parks said. The most recent property tax appraisal, in 2001, estimated the shopping center's value at $5.2 million. HERB CARMEN, who designed Cum-Park, envisioned it as an enclosed mall. He had just come to Burlington, where he still works as an architect at Alley, Williams, Carmen & King. Potential tenants weren't enthusiastic -- Carmen says the idea was "before its time" by a few years -- and he, Cummings and Parks tried again with a strip-mall design. Most people don't know Cum-Park was to have been an enclosed mall. Chris Parks said he didn't know that until last week, when he and his father were interviewed about the shopping center's history. Cummings and Parks were brothers-in-law before they were business partners. Hugh Cummings married Rebecca Coble, and Carl Parks married her sister, Dorothy Coble. Before the two men formed Cummings and Parks Development Corp., Cummings' business successes included the Remnant Shop. The store, which sold fabric and other textiles, began in Haw River and spread to include locations throughout North Carolina and in other Southern states. Parks had been a brick contractor. The men borrowed $1.4 million to build the center. A broker in Durham arranged the loan. "It was a little bit scary," Rebecca Cummings said this week. "That was something new at the time, and a leap of faith on the part of my husband and Mr. Parks." Construction of Cum-Park Plaza began in February 1963. The Times-News reported that Daniel Construction Co. of Greensboro used 254,000 oversized bricks, 65,000 cement blocks, 350 tons of steel and 2,528 yards of concrete. When the shopping center opened that August, its largest stores were a Winn-Dixie grocery store and Roses, a discount department store that has been at Cum-Park ever since. There was an unexpected hazard to the shopping center's size: the large parking lot that went along with it. There weren't as many dividers and other safety measures as there are now. "Burlington just wasn't used to such a big parking lot," Carmen said. "There were quite a few bump-ups." CUM-PARK PLAZA was the subject of a 10-page special section in the Times-News, then The Daily Times-News, the day before it opened. The section describes a time when the county had three resident beauty queens: Miss Burlington, Miss Graham and Miss Mebane. All three were at Cum-Park's opening. The Rev. Wally Snyder, three years into his three decades as head of Elon Homes for Children, gave the invocation. The money people threw into a wishing well at the shopping center went to children who lived at Elon Homes. If you shopped at Cum-Park's Winn-Dixie the week it opened, you could get 12 jars of baby food for 99 cents. A threepound package of ground beef cost $1. You'd get one S&H green stamp for every dime you spent at the store. When Allen started working for Roses at Cum-Park Plaza, she'd been at the Roses store in downtown Burlington since 1961. She was a high school senior when she started work there. Her first job was putting together Easter baskets. Two years later, she started at the Cum-Park Roses as office manager. The woman who had planned to do the job quit suddenly, the Allen took her place. "I got drafted," Allen said, "and here I still am." She has been store manager there since the mid-1990s. Some of the activity when Cum-Park was new was as much social as commercial. Allen remembers spring and fall fashion shows that at least once brought the reigning Miss North Carolina to town. She tries not to live in the past, but admits to missing the glamorous aspect of those years. But Allen plans to stick with the shopping center as it goes into its next phase. "I get asked almost every day, 'Aren't you going to retire?'" she said. I'm going to be here for a while longer. I enjoy what I do." She thinks many shoppers will stick around as well. Since Wal-Mart opened a store nearby on Graham-Hopedale Road in April, she's had people tell her they'll still do their shopping at Cum-Park Plaza. "We've got our good, faithful shoppers," she said. The Wal-Mart has "hurt some," Chris Parks acknowledged, "especially when it first opened." But he said an employee at Cum-Park's Food Lion told him sales have returned to about the same level as before Wal-Mart opened. CARL AND CHRIS PARKS talked about the shopping center's history last week while standing in Cum-Park's covered walkway. The area catches whatever breeze is available, "nice in the summer, but cold as the dickens in the winter," Chris Parks said. "This has been a good shopping center," Carl Parks said. "But age is wearing us out." He, Dorothy Parks and Rebecca Cummings are in their 80s. The three have made the major decisions about the shopping center since Hugh Cummings' death. Chris Parks, at 47, said he'll be looking for another business opportunity. He's stuck around the office some to help the new management. His life has been entwined with the center's history: He was born the year before his father and Hugh Cummings announced their plans. As a small boy, he rode along on the big Caterpillar tractor that graded the land before construction. Though Cum-Park lost its novelty as Alamance County's growth produced many more places to shop, Carl and Chris Parks said it kept a good base of customers. People stopped coming from out of town to shop there, but many still came from nearby. That includes a large number of Latino customers as that population has grown in Burlington. A general store that caters to Latino shoppers opened at Cum-Park three years ago. Out of 31 spaces for businesses, 27 are occupied. Roses and Food Lion are the largest stores. Cum-Park's other offerings include a pet store, a Chinese restaurant, a diner, a thrift store and a tanning salon. Cum-Park Plaza may look its age, but Carl and Chris Parks have taken care of it with the kind of attention you might expect a family to give to their home. The shopping center, in fact, sits on 19 acres that were once farmland owned by the Parks family. Chris Parks, who has managed the center since 2000, regularly cleaned trash out of the parking lot. His dad talks about putting up Christmas decorations during the holiday season. He mowed the grass himself. "I mowed it the weekend after we closed (on the sale)," he said. "I wanted to turn it over with the grass mowed." Mike Wilder can be reached at [email protected] |