South Iowa Street retailer closing Lawrence location

For years as a reporter who worked a Tuesday night shift, I regularly had my Tuesday mornings off. I have to admit that I did not spend many of them in Lawrence’s Tuesday Morning store, although in hindsight I might have been well-served to purchase some closeout bedding supplies. (I covered City Commission meetings, and sometimes a comfortable pillow could be a real asset.) Regardless, your days of being able to shop Lawrence’s Tuesday Morning store are numbered.

The store at 2525 Iowa St. is set to close in the near future. The store closing sign is now up, and the store has begun discounting merchandise.

For those of you not familiar with Tuesday Morning, you don’t know what you have been missing out on. For instance, you probably don’t have a storage shed in your backyard devoted to storing those unexpected bargains that you come across. Tuesday Morning is the type of store that you don’t know exactly what you will find when you enter. Its niche is closeout merchandise for the home. Since it is closeout material, its merchandise varies significantly from one month to the next.

But the store has several key categories, including furniture, bedding, home decor, small appliances and other items related to the home.

I received no real word on why Tuesday Morning is closing its Lawrence store. An employee there told me she expects the store will close sometime in September. Other stores in the area are remaining open. The closest stores are in the Wanamaker shopping district of Topeka, plus one in Lenexa.

The shopping center has been one I’ve been keeping an eye on for awhile. It was purchased a couple of years ago by a locally based development group that includes members of the Hatfield family. It has since redeveloped a portion of the space that formerly housed Discovery Furniture into a new Planet Fitness workout facility, which recently opened for business.

The development group still has about 23,000 square feet of space that was occupied by Discovery Furniture that is now waiting to be redeveloped. The pending closure of Tuesday Morning adds a few thousand more square feet that is up for grabs by retailers.

Longtime commercial real estate agent Christian Ablah — who has been involved with bringing stores such as Dick’s Sporting Goods, Best Buy and others to Lawrence — is part of the development group. He told me Thursday that he doesn’t have anything new to report on tenant activity at the site, but he previously has said interest has been strong in the location. Chain retailers interested in Lawrence definitely are focused on south Iowa Street at the moment.

It will be interesting to see if a larger redevelopment play is made at that corner of 25th and Iowa. Directly behind the Planet Fitness building is a small and rather dated retail strip development that houses several small businesses. It doesn’t have good visibility from Iowa Street, but as retail interest along south Iowa increases, this may be the time that changes happen to that center.