Antioch, Cool Springs, Franklin & Nashville, Tennessee
Walgreens stores are a series of very similar buildings for a company with many locations – buildings that are designed to meet the company’s specific space needs and be easily recognizable to the public. These buildings are intended to be quick and efficient to construct – with tight schedules and budgets. But some sites require a contractor who is not only efficient but also an experienced problem-solver.
Walgreens chooses their locations based on things like traffic patterns and visibility and expects the stores to go up quickly. But sometimes the chosen site offers some special challenges for the builders – challenges that require adaptability and ingenuity in problem-solving that only comes from experience with all kinds of building projects. The Walgreens developer chose Carden to meet those kinds of challenges for two of their Nashville stores.
The difficulty for the Walgreens at Murfreesboro Pike and Hamilton Church Road in Antioch was unstable soil conditions for the building and parking lot.
Rich Magner of Morgan Property Group, which manages construction for Walgreens, recalled that “even though we’d done soil borings, we didn’t realize we were sitting on a little mountain. Getting all that rock out of there definitely wasn’t easy, but they (Carden Company) did it without any problem.”
The second site at Highway 41 and Thompson Lane was also complicated. Through the center of the construction area ran what Magner called “an old – actually decaying – double-barreled storm sewer pipe. Huge – you could almost walk in it.”
“The problem was,” continued Magner, “we bought two pieces of property and were sticking the building over both pieces, and this thing ran right through the middle.
We couldn’t build over it – it would have run right through the buildings.” So another location on the site was found for a brand-new pipe, and because the problem was foreseen and planned for, it didn’t throw off the schedule.
The way Carden Company worked with the owner and designers to handle this kind of construction difficulties impressed Rich Magner, who manages the building of Walgreens stores in other parts of the country. “They did a great job,” said Magner. “I’ve been trying to get them to come over and do some projects somewhere else – because they’ve been, by far, the best contractor that we’ve used and we’ve done these things all over the country.”