Darrell Laurant: Is there a location problem?

Random thoughts for a Monday …

... When you live in a place long enough, you start to notice patterns. I’ve always been intrigued by the spaces in and around Lynchburg that seem to be graveyards for businesses, especially restaurants.

Sometimes, the reason for the problem is obvious — there isn’t enough parking, the drive-by visibility is poor, the location is counter to the normal flow of traffic.

Other times, it’s more of a mystery. I thought about this when I heard that the Famous Anthony’s on U.S. 221 was closing.

According to the recent story in our newspaper, “The company said the two locations were too close to each other.

“‘It just pulled too much business away,’” said Bonny Neale, vice president of operations for Famous Anthony’s. The Wards Road restaurant is about a five-mile drive from the Lakeside Drive location.”

That seems odd, because the Ward’s Road and 221 restaurants would appear to depend on two very different drive-by streams. Also, while Famous Anthony’s certainly has its fans, there’s nothing about the menu that makes it unique.

The 221 location has plenty of parking and is convenient to one of the areas’ major highways. It was once the site of a food court built to capitalize on the then-new Frit-O-Lay plant, a proposed marriage that must not have been made in heaven. The food court went belly up, another restaurant followed, and now a Hyundai dealership will replace Famous Anthony’s.

Here are a few other “Bermuda Triangles” for restaurants and other businesses that I’ve noticed over the years.

1. The corner space at the rear of the Plaza, right next to the road going down to the Visulite Theater. It has hosted an entire United Nations of ethnic restaurants, all of them doomed to failure. I don’t even know what’s there now.

2. The corner of Moorman’s Road and the old Old Forest Road. This is more of a black hole than a Bermuda Triangle, because it isn’t really on the way to anywhere. The C&S Cafe held out there the longest, but since then the dominos have been falling quickly.

3. The corner of Main and 12th. This is the beating heart of the city, adjacent to the Community Market and a collection of other apparently thriving restaurants. Maybe that’s the problem, along with parking, but this building has seen restaurants come and go at the rate of nearly one a year. No doubt the owners of the current occupant, a Mexican restaurant, hopes to break the jinx.

… Is Sunday church the highlight of your week? If so, you’ll love 2012.

Reader Mary Coates pointed out recently that five months this year contain five Sundays — January, April, July, September and December. That’s because it’s a leap year.

“Think of all the poor ministers who have to keep coming up with those extra sermons,” she added.

Well, that’s true. On the flip side, however, think of all those extra collections from the congregation.

… In a column last week asking for first-person recollections of the day E.C. Glass High School was integrated 50 years ago, I wrote that I would have been one of those curious white kids peering out the window as Lynda Woodruff and Owen Cardwell arrived.

Over the next few days, I received several e-mails telling me that no one was looking out the window at that moment, because all the students were in class. Yet I distinctly remembered seeing the kids-in-windows scene in our newspaper.

Finally, Owen Cardwell cleared it up for me.

“The newspaper had two editions,” he recalled, “and the afternoon paper showed all these students looking out of the second floor windows. But that was before we got there. By then, apparently, all the students had been sent into their classrooms so there was nobody around.”