Wal-Mart officials say their customers want a new supercenter at Sixth and Wakarusa. But you couldn’t tell that from the northwest Lawrence residents who attended at an informational meeting Thursday night.

Most of the roughly 50 people who attended the meeting at Quail Run School were opposed to the store; many of them were downright hostile.

“Are you getting the feeling we don’t want you here?” said Lawrence resident Burke Beeler.

But Wal-Mart officials and their allies said they’re working to create a store that would be appreciated by its neighbors.

“We are trying to make this more of a community Wal-Mart, for a unique community, instead of throwing out our typical Wal-Mart,” said Caroline Bigio, real estate manager for the retail chain.

As proposed, the Wal-Mart would occupy 190,000 square feet  plus another 9,000 square feet for an outdoor garden center  at the northwest corner of Sixth Street and Wakarusa Drive. The supercenter would include a full-service grocery store, officials said, and would eventually be open 24 hours a day. Wal-Mart’s existing store at 31st and Iowa would remain open.

Developers tried to assuage residents’ fears before the meeting started, showing them artists’ renderings of a store that will use trees, berms and a brick wall to screen the center from its neighbors. The facade will be red brick instead of the cream exterior common to Wal-Marts; the garden center will have brick pillars and fake wrought-iron molding.

And Wal-Mart officials said they’ve redesigned the store so that delivery trucks won’t be seen from nearby neighborhoods while they’re unloading their cargo.

“You’ll never see all the store at any one time” from outside the store site, said Ray Frankenburg, a private consultant working for Wal-Mart.

Residents peppered store proponents with questions about wages at the store, the amount of traffic it would generate, the products (including guns) that would be sold there and its proximity to nearby Free State High School.

Frankenburg said the store would generate more than 800 cars an hour of traffic during peak business. It would be more, he said, if a grocery store, garden center and discount store were to be built separately at the same intersection.

“The traffic is a reduction from what this would be if it was allowed as a series of stores,” he said.

That didn’t satisfy opponents.

“We’re not real thrilled with putting this store in next to Free State,” said Doug Burger, who lives near the site. “The students have a hard enough time navigating the traffic that’s there. They don’t need 800 cars an hour to compete with while going to school.”

Other residents said they feared the center would kill off existing Lawrence businesses, especially downtown.

“This is a local community with a lot of local business that will not survive a second Wal-Mart store,” northwest Lawrence resident David Schauner said to applause.

Bigio said that wouldn’t happen.

“I don’t necessarily want to compete with your downtown,” she said. “You are too unique.”

The Lawrence-Douglas County Planning Commission is scheduled to consider the matter at its next meeting, 6:30 p.m. Oct. 23 in City Hall, Sixth and Massachusetts streets.