For 46 years, Reid Ace Hardware stood on North Memorial Parkway as a throwback to a bygone era of business, where the owner worked the counter and helped customers find that peculiar part no one else had or that out-of-production hose for that ancient appliance.

It is fitting that Reid's, closed now for six years after the death of founders Joe and Mary Gene Reid, is the first part of a project to reclaim, modernize and upgrade Memorial Parkway.

Last week the Huntsville City Council approved spending $195,000 of a $2 million budget to buy the Reid Ace Hardware building and raze it, creating room, and perhaps a catalyst, for new development along the Parkway.

Urban Development Director Shane Davis said the city may scout around for a private developer to buy the site for a new retail venture. Or it could serve as free parking for neighboring businesses that lost much of their own parking during the Max Luther Drive overpass construction project.

Whatever is next for the Reid Ace Hardware property will be a much needed improvement, and a good starting place for what we believe is a smart use of taxpayer money.

As part of this fiscal year's budget, Mayor Tommy Battle proposed, and the council agreed, to set aside $2 million to buy to buy privately-owned commercial areas so the city can demolish decaying buildings and make the land available for redevelopment

"We have a lot of these 30-, 40- and 50 year-old buildings that have been sitting empty for so long," said Battle when the budget passed last September. "The land is probably worth more without the buildings there."

As Councilman Richard Showers pointed out during a trolley tour of north Huntsville last week, north Huntsville, and particularly the areas skirting the Parkway, has plenty of opportunity for investment and redevelopment.

We applaud the city's effort to buy up blighted properties and prepare them for new uses, and Showers' and Councilwoman Jennie Robinson's formation of business associations in north and south Huntsville.

Those groups of citizen stakeholders, with support from an administration eager to work with them, can provide the buy-in and ideas Huntsville needs to clean up the Parkway from one end to the other.

We hope that Davis' comment on that bus tour of north Huntsville last week will prove prophetic:

""Three years from now, (North Parkway) could look like something you've never seen."