I would like to see a use for this building that would bring people downtown on a regular basis. Except for the City of Roseville offices, the whole stretch of Vernon Street is almost totally dead. I recently drove down Vernon on a week day at 2PM. Vast areas had no cars in the diagonal spaces largely because all the buildings are vacant. No pedestrians were on the sidewalks. Pathetic!

Such a people-oriented use would be a Market Hall comprised of small shops around the theme of food and drink. The old Ferry Building in SF is an elegant interpretation of this theme as is Fanuel Hall in Boston, but I have seen smaller versions in smaller towns work very successfully. It would be like the food court at a shopping center but with other stores that sell fruits and vegetables, cheese, breads, etc. I could imagine that one of the stores might be a coffehouse (please NOT Starbuck's); another could be a wine bar; still other stores could sell ethnic foods to eat on the premises.

You are not going to get shoppers to abandon the Galleria and other concentrations, so go with a different concept that offers people something they can't get elsewhere.

I was going to suggest that the building would be perfect for an antique mall.

However, I also think rfbalt made a pretty good suggestion. So far the attempt to renew the downtown area seems like it didn't work. If you look at Placerville or many of the little towns with historic downtowns, they have more of a community feel to them. Our downtown doesn't really feel community oriented to me. Starting with the angle parking they did a few years ago. If you have a small car, and you park next to an SUV, backing out is a nightmare.

We receive mixed messages from the City planners: Shop at our malls. Shop in your community. Shop downtown. Which is it? Should I shop downtown on Monday and Wednesday and shop at the mall on weekends?

Steve Pease (KMS) has been an active member of the Chamber's Revitalization Committee and we've all had many discussions about this. Our community gave feedback and the Downtown Roseville Merchants have given similar feedback. I believe KMS has a good pulse on our community's desires as well as the City's desires...which happen to be the same!

I can tell you what the ideal characteristic will be: A business that brings a lot of people downtown all through the day and night. This will be a feeder to the other merchants and will bring more lifeblood to our downtown. Anything else would be a failure.

Downtown Roseville is still the only destination in Roseville that has all of the three: HISTORY (the history of Roseville started right here), CULTURE (almost all of the communities best cultural events happen right here), and UNIQUE (most of the businesses downtown are one-of-a-kind and can't be found anywhere else in the world). A business that embrasses these is ideal.

The best types of anchor businesses for downtown areas like ours are full-featured restaurants such as Cheesecake Factory (which is not an option because of the new one coming in another area). This type of restaurant is well-known, draws customers to the area day and night and offers a bar for the later evening crowd. Another type of anchor would be something like a mini-mall that offered several dozens of custom shops from morning into the evening. These shops would add to the "unique" aspect of most downtown businesses.

The WORST type of businesses (in my opinion) for THIS location would include: Starbucks/Jamba Juice (too small for the building and too big of a name for an old downtown--besides, Starbucks will not bring NEW people downtown because there are dozens already around Roseville); an art gallery (while we have a few cool art galleries downtown, THIS location needs to contain something special that will draw a LOT more people downtown); OR any kind of business that will not bring in new people all day long (and hopefully night).