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Will an empty Lakewood supermarket welcome grocery shoppers again? Curious Texas finds out 

Neighborhoods take ownership of their grocery stores, and they hate to see one sitting empty.

Jeffrey and Annette Patterson have lived in the Lakewood area of Dallas about 30 years, and they were loyal to one grocery store for their weekly shopping needs all that time.

They're the kind of people who adopt a grocery store as their own. They know the aisles. They know the friendly employees. And now, two years since it closed, they still miss the supermarket on the southeast corner of Mockingbird and Abrams.

The longtime Albertsons store, which for a short time was a Minyard Sun Fresh Market, closed in August 2016. The Albertsons seemed to be the most conveniently located for them — even as they lived in three different houses in Lakewood and raised three now-grown daughters, Jeffrey Patterson said.

The traditional supermarket served most of their weekly shopping needs. Now he and his wife wonder how their thriving neighborhood is left with a big empty store and parking lot.

"My wife complains about it all the time. An empty store means a vacant alley ... where trouble can happen," he said. "No one likes to see it. It's now just an eyesore."

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He said they're "not picky" about what goes in it, they just want it filled again.

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The Pattersons now shop at Tom Thumb, Whole Foods Market and Central Market. They tried buying groceries online several months ago, but decided that wasn't their thing. "We liked the modest, simplicity of going to a traditional grocery store with friendly employees."

Patterson submitted his question to Curious Texas, an ongoing project from The Dallas Morning News that invites you to become part of the news business by giving us some assignments. The idea is simple: You have questions, and our journalists track down answers.

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It's a good thing the Pattersons have established new grocery shopping patterns.

The building which housed a supermarket for decades has a future as something else.

"It will not be a grocer," said Ward Kampf, president of Northwood Retail, the Dallas-based company that owns the building.

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"It's being carved up into two or three spaces," Kampf said, adding "we should have a better idea in 30 days what tenants will occupy the building."

Sun Fresh Market had taken over the Lakewood store after Albertsons was forced to sell it,...
Sun Fresh Market had taken over the Lakewood store after Albertsons was forced to sell it, but the company was unable to keep the supermarket profitable, closing it in August 2016.(Maria Halkias / Staff)

Northwood Investors purchased the store from Lincoln Properties in April 2017. Lincoln only owned it for a few months after purchasing it from H-E-B's Central Market division, which purchased it from Sun Fresh, which went out of business.

For decades the intersection housed more than one grocery store, but when Albertsons purchased Tom Thumb's parent company Safeway in 2015, an antitrust review required Albertsons to sell a dozen stores in Dallas-Fort Worth so as not to monopolize various submarkets, such as the intersection of Mockingbird and Abrams Road. But the stores were sold to a weaker grocery operator who couldn't keep them open.

Now the intersection has one grocery store, a Tom Thumb. But the landscape has changed. A straight shot down Greenville finds a Trader Joe's, and a small new-concept Sam's Club is coming. South on Abrams is a Whole Foods Market. East on Gaston is another Tom Thumb. There's a large Kroger on Mockingbird and a Central Market on Lovers Lane. But all those can take some annoying extra minutes to get to, depending on traffic and the time of day. It's not the same as driving straight through on Hillside Drive into the old Albertsons parking lot.

The store the Pattersons miss operated under a couple other names before its long tenure as an Albertsons.

It was a Jewel-Osco and then a Skaggs for a short time before it became an Albertsons in 1992. In the early 1990s, according to a column in The Dallas Morning News, the store's small lunch seating area was reserved for the Mockingbird Coffee Club, a group of 20 or so men in their 70s and 80s who would drop in and out in the mornings from 8 to 11 a.m. to chat with whoever showed up that day.

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Twitter: @MariaHalkias

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