photo by: Nick Krug

At this eastside strip mall on the fringe of a food desert, there are more places to find methadone than to find an apple. The convenience store that proclaims itself a food mart devotes as much shelf space to pantry staples as it does to dog treats, T-shirts, coin wrappers and rubber bands. A pair of storefronts outfitted with kitchen space have exhausted a lazy Susan of restaurants, most with expiration dates measured in months rather than years. Today, both are shuttered, the ghosts and the grease of their forefathers all that stuck.

photo by: Nick Krug

If their stories are to be believed, this is just about the unluckiest place in Lawrence to start a small business. The price of entry is set by the failed names over the doors — in some cases, when you open for business, they’re still hanging there. A comedy store. A boxing club that doubled as a screen-printing business. Oriental Pearl. Midwest Fish Frye. Miracle Video.

“We’re all here together in this little shopping center that has gone through a lot,” explains Curtis Campbell, program director at Center for Change and co-owner of Road to Recovery, two for-profit substance abuse clinics that along with the convenience store count themselves among the eight surviving tenants. “You’ve got the thrift store down on the end, some kind of multicultural braid thing. There’s a bar called Playerz where a guy got shot a while ago. Then there’s the massage parlor that we all just wink-wink-nod-nod about, a liquor store and us.

photo by: Nick Krug

“You might call this a den of iniquity,” a label that if publicized, he suggests with enthusiasm, could be good for Center for Change, which is prohibited by law from advertising its methadone services.

To be fair, Campbell isn’t the first to offer such a negative analysis. A 2008 Journal-World story about an art gallery opening here — it’s since gone out of business — had this to say: “To East Lawrence townies, Haskell Square is affectionately referred to as ‘The Vice Mall,’ a one-stop shop for all of your porn, liquor, parole, Payday Loan and comfort-food needs.” Eight years later, those ventures have folded, replaced by new waves of mostly honest people with mostly honest dreams.

Now, there’s reason to ask whether this Stephen King of a shopping center can author a brighter chapter. A roadway extension could bring an influx of traffic. A national chain might put more customers on its doorstep. But a bad reputation, just like bad luck, can be hard to shake.

Even Campbell, who minces no words in describing himself as an ex-addict who “got clean years ago,” admits of the 50-year-old strip mall on the southeast corner of 19th Street and Haskell Avenue: “Most of it’s perception rather than fact.”

Seen from above, Haskell Square makes a backward L, the convenience store and gas station an apostrophe at its upper left. On weekdays, dozens of cars shine like tiles at the edge of the parking lot, where Lawrence residents have left their vehicles to catch the K-10 Connector bus to Johnson County Community College in Overland Park. Across Haskell to the west is Chief Jim McSwain Park and its wide expanse of freshly mowed grass. To the north and south is a mix of condominiums and single-family homes that come as close as anything in Lawrence to what can be called affordable housing; most of them are rentals. To the east, beyond a fence that has seen better days, a 5-acre, 19th century farmstead whiles away in pastoral beauty.

photo by: Nick Krug

Since 1983, Dennis Dailey has owned that property on the other side of the fence, making him one of Haskell Square’s oldest neighbors. The Kansas University professor emeritus of social welfare and his wife, Judy, acquired the Robert H. Miller Home & Farm from another family, who bought it from the Millers after 100 years of ownership. The original two-story home was built in 1858, with other elements of the farm — a milk house, a barn and a brick privy — added in the decades that followed, according to documents filed with the National Register of Historic Places.

Like its small-business neighbors, the Miller house is a kind of survivor, too, having been passed over by bushwhackers in Quantrill’s Raid — William Quantrill was friends with the family. But it is also a landmark of abolition. The strangeness of this dichotomy is not lost on the property’s modern owner.

“We’re on the Quantrill tour, so people drop by,” Dailey explains. “And then we have black families who stop in and knock on our door and want to know about the Underground Railroad,” which the Miller home was part of. “That’s a very different and emotional experience than just telling people about Quantrill.”

photo by: Nick Krug

Dailey, who calls the neighborhood “a delightful place to live” that’s not without its issues, bristles at its reputation among some members of the Lawrence community.

“I think it’s racism and the issues of poverty,” he says bluntly. “We don’t have a lot of houses out here that sell for half a million dollars.”

In the shadows of straw bales, burnished grasses nod in the breeze on his side of the fence, whose slats offer glimpses of what lies beyond: haphazard islands of shelving, easy chairs and futons dumped on the backside of the strip mall as businesses one by one moved out, the chaff of dreams that all went belly up.

In the 33 years he’s owned the property, Dailey estimates, at least two dozen of them have cycled through Haskell Square’s storefronts and, eventually, out its back doors. Given a moment to reflect, “that might be on the conservative side,” he jokes. “I don’t think you’d ever describe it as a bustling place. It’s always had half or three-quarters occupancy.

“It’s been true for many years.”

A shrewd businessperson with a keen eye for history could draw a clever conclusion from the parable of Haskell Square: With so many specialties imagined and extinguished — coins, baseball cards, arcade games, pig-ear sandwiches — why not instead open a store that offers Something for Everyone?

That’s exactly what Scott Weatherwax did two years ago. His thrift shop caps the long end of the strip mall’s L, closest to 19th Street and the Miller house. Inside, porcelain figurines are stacked atop an empty cooler for energy drinks, and used bicycle helmets dangle beside a rainbow hula hoop.

photo by: Nick Krug

Weatherwax owns Free State Doors Inc., 1100 E. 11th St., and the thrift store is actually his second foray into the strip mall. In the early 1970s, he operated a laundromat here. But his family connection with Haskell Square runs even deeper than that.

Weatherwax’s father, John, who died in 2008, was a former Lawrence mayor and a longtime principal in Viking Investment Corp., the company that built the strip mall in 1968. Those were different times, Scott Weatherwax recalls.

“Have you seen that show ‘Mad Men’?” he asks fondly. “That’s the way Viking Investment used to be — sleazy secretaries, Bloody Marys at 9 in the morning. They were a wild bunch of guys. They built all those houses out there by the (Douglas County Fairgrounds) for the soldiers coming back from the Korean War. They’d sell them for like $3,200 apiece.

“They would still probably be very proud of that neighborhood,” he says of his father and his business partners. “That was one of the very first projects they turned in.”

For Weatherwax, his current association with the strip mall is markedly less positive. His thrift store has been closed since December after a broken water pipe ruined part of the shop and left him without a working restroom, he says. He blames Overland Park-based PACS Properties LLC, which oversees Haskell Square, for not fixing the problem. The company’s owner, Ajay Suvarna, calls that claim “totally baseless.”

“If you’re not successful, you blame it on the landlord,” contends Suvarna, who says he spent more than $60,000 of his own money on property upgrades, including 10,000 square feet of new roofing, last year. “Right now I have five tenants going through the eviction process because they don’t pay the rent.” A recent lack of payments has jeopardized his own business interests, admits Suvarna, who says he’s “hand-to-mouth” on the strip mall’s mortgage. “If they don’t pay me, then I can’t pay.”

photo by: Nick Krug

Terry Leibold, an attorney for Great American Bank, which holds the mortgage for Haskell Square, on March 22 sent a letter to current tenants instructing them that the mortgage was in default and to make rent payments directly to the bank, according to documents provided by the businesses. Suvarna insists that action was taken on his behalf. As of last week, the bank had neither taken possession of the property nor filed any legal action again PACS Properties, Leibold told the Journal-World.

None of that makes much difference to Weatherwax. “When it rains, I’ve got 35 buckets in there catching stuff,” he complains of a storage area he also rents at Haskell Square. “There’s mold and mildew in this whole (expletive) mall.”

He’s fighting to keep his store, he explains, in part because he sees the intersection of 19th and Haskell as a future magnet for development. “It is going to be a prime location, that’s the reason I’m trying to hang on. … In six or eight years it’s going to connect out east to the freeway, and then the traffic will start pouring in.”

That’s a view Suvarna can agree with. “Once 19th Street opens up that way in 2017,” he says, “it will be good because the new bypass that comes into Venture Park” — the city’s business district that sits on 200 acres to the east — “will bring back a lot of traffic. In five years, this should bring the mall back to its former glory.”

Weatherwax’s store might not make it that long. Being a shrewd businessperson sometimes means trusting your gut over your keen eye, he admits.

“I should have had some hindsight and knew something weird would happen,” Weatherwax says frankly.

Despite Haskell Square’s reputation as a Wild West of entrepreneurship, not everyone here is just starting out. One of the strip mall’s most enduring tenants, Miracle Video, began its life in North Lawrence before relocating to the east side for a solid, 15-year run, finally closing in 2013. Its longtime owner, Lawrence artist Dan Jochems, died two years later, the day after Christmas 2015. His business had a particular draw: Though it catered to movie buffs of all stripes, Miracle Video’s broad selection of adult films earned it citywide infamy or celebrity, depending on whom you asked.

photo by: Nick Krug

Like Jochems, Sira Andrews brought her business to Haskell Square after finding success elsewhere. The certified public accountant, who came from Mali to KU in 2002 and now calls Lawrence home, operates Chez Sira African Hair Braiding Salon in her spare time, on weekends and by appointment. Most of her customer base is drawn from previous versions of her salon, when it was located in Wichita and then Topeka and business was booming, she says.

In June 2014, wanting to be closer to her husband, a Lawrence native, she tallied the costs and benefits of various storefronts before settling on this one — “the worst mistake I’ve ever made, to be honest.”

“This location doesn’t help me at all. If anything, it hurts me,” she explains with a mixture of frustration and amusement. “I didn’t know this part of town was that chaotic. I just thought it was affordable.”

One of her clients insists the salon’s doors be locked during weekend styling sessions, but like most of the people interviewed for this story, Andrews believes the neighborhood is safe.

“I can tell you it’s not dangerous at all; I’ve never had a violent incident here,” she says. “But it’s the perception — everyone thinks it is a ghetto.”

photo by: Nick Krug

Chez Sira is sparsely furnished with salon chairs, zebra-print couches and a big-screen TV arranged on a worn concrete floor. The back wall of the business has exposed cinder blocks and a makeshift security system: a metal bar pinned against the back door.

When Andrews moved in, she laments, “the air-conditioning wasn’t working, the bathroom wasn’t working, the ceiling was rotting — I didn’t even have a switch when you entered to turn on the lights.” The name of her business is misspelled on the strip mall’s main sign along Haskell Avenue, a monument to the hasty work of whoever posted it.

Still, she endures.

“I have a lease,” Andrews says flatly. “Besides, I don’t have time to find another place, to move everything. It takes too much time.” Six years in business elsewhere taught her plenty of lessons, she adds, but Haskell Square had one more up its sleeve.

“I learned the cheapest is not the best sometimes.”

Next door to Chez Sira, a sign still advertises Haskell Avenue Cafe, a diner once briefly famous for its hash-brown omelet. In its prime, it opened at 5 a.m. weekdays with an eye on the cluster of commuters who regularly congregate at Haskell Square to catch the Johnson County bus that runs between Lawrence and Overland Park. Mechanical issues with a kitchen vent fan and water damage have since closed the cafe indefinitely.

photo by: Nick Krug

Other restaurants that washed out of the strip mall have suffered from similar setbacks with the aging building’s condition, according to Kansas Department of Agriculture restaurant inspection records. Bum Steer BBQ, which once called Haskell Square home, had mold issues, a missing wall and an open hole infested with insects leading directly outdoors from the kitchen. A short-lived club called El Perro or The Dog had a leaky roof. Genia Lyns Cafe, which preceded Haskell Avenue Cafe, had a hole in the wall and missing ceiling tiles. A report on Kingfish Soulfood Bistro, which closed last year on the south side of Haskell Square, reads: “Ceiling tiles are missing throughout the establishment due to a roof leak. … The landlord is not keeping the building in good repair.”

Suvarna, who disputes that claim, points out that new businesses throughout Lawrence falter more often than not, especially when their main attraction is food. Certainly, it’s nothing that’s specific to the east side, he observes. The economic downturn that began a few years after he acquired the strip mall hasn’t helped either. “The 2008 financial recession, whatever you call it,” he says, “that put a toll on the mall. A lot of restaurants were struggling.” Still, when it’s one of his own, “I do feel bad for them,” he explains.

photo by: Nick Krug

Meanwhile, the commuters those restaurants served might soon be displaced. Though the bus isn’t going anywhere, the free parking Haskell Square provides to its riders could be bulldozed under in a matter of months. In January, Dollar General filed plans to open a 9,100-square-foot store in what would be a new structure on the south edge of the property. A building permit was submitted March 10 to the city, and site and survey work has since been undertaken in the portion of the parking lot where K-10 commuters leave their cars. The wheels are in motion, but nothing is set in stone.

“We are currently in due diligence for a new store on Haskell (Avenue) in Lawrence, which means we’re interested in adding a new location to Douglas County but have not committed to doing so yet,” Crystal Ghassemi, a spokeswoman with Dollar General’s corporate offices in Goodlettsville, Tenn., told the Journal-World. “Based on our current timeline, I anticipate a decision will not be made on the store until late June.”

On a recent Monday afternoon, Mersadees Sampson stepped off the bus onto the asphalt where the Dollar General one day could rise. The Free State High School graduate is a first-year journalism student at JCCC. Three days per week, she commutes from her home in west Lawrence, parks her car here, and pays the $7 round-trip fare to attend classes. It’s an affordable, convenient and, she says, safe alternative to driving that she discovered a semester ago.

“It’s a good option for people like me,” Sampson explains with a shrug. “I don’t worry too much about safety in Lawrence. I used to live in Las Vegas.”

If you’re looking for “a knife-and-gun club,” this isn’t it. That’s what Michelle Seidner calls the notorious Crosstown Tavern, which once occupied the space now known as Playerz Sports Bar and which Seidner used to frequent. In 1997, an 18-year-old Lawrence man, Trampas Hutchinson, was nearly beaten to death outside of Crosstown, which was also the site of several stabbings.

“When we came in here we knew there was a reputation that came along with this facility,” Seidner, a special education teacher for the Lawrence school district, admits of Playerz, which she has co-owned since 2012 with April Oakes, a paralegal. “Our No. 1 goal was to try to change that, to get people in all of Lawrence to understand we’re something different.”

photo by: Nick Krug

That hasn’t exactly been easy. A January shooting outside the bar left Lee Simmons Jr., 32, whom Seidner calls a friend, in serious condition after he tried to break up a fight in the parking lot. Geoffrey Eugene Morrison, 28, of Lawrence, faces a felony charge of aggravated battery in the attack. For Seidner, the shooting was “frightening, heartbreaking and totally unnecessary.”

“The person who was shot was trying to protect this place,” she says, noting most of the Playerz bartenders are women who work what can be a tough job late at night. “We encourage our bartenders to call 911 whenever they need to, whenever they’re uncomfortable. I think at this establishment in the past that hasn’t always been part of the deal.”

A review of raw emergency calls provided by Lawrence police shows 503 for the strip mall as a whole since 2005. “These raw statistics will include any traffic accident or citation,” explained police Sgt. Amy Rhoads, who provided the Journal-World with the numbers. “Calls for service do not necessarily mean that a police report was taken or that an officer found any criminal activity.” They’re also tallied when someone proactively dials 911 to report suspicious behavior. Lawrence police are working on but do not currently have publicly available crime-mapping software, noted Capt. Anthony Brixius, making an apples-to-apples account of crime in different parts of the city difficult to illustrate. Some downtown Lawrence locations have received more than 300 calls in the same period.

photo by: Nick Krug

“We try not to dwell on the negative,” Seidner says of the increased media scrutiny that followed the shooting. “We’re into giving back to the community; we want this to be a people’s place, a place where the love is shown.” Since opening, Playerz has quickly become a neighborhood hangout for birthday parties, Indian taco sales, domino games, Thursday night karaoke and even line-dancing lessons. In February, the bar hosted a Stop the Violence music bash for charity that brought in tables full of donations to the Willow Domestic Violence Center and Penn House.

Oakes still calls East Lawrence home. Seidner now lives in North Lawrence but spent a good deal of time on the east side.

“My perspective is it’s kind of the forgotten part of Lawrence,” she says. “I see a lot of growth in west Lawrence but not in the east, for families or anyone.” She points out the bus stop at the edge of the parking lot, a makeshift cluster of chairs some Good Samaritans spray-painted and delivered. Before they appeared, there wasn’t even a place for commuters to sit. “I think the people in this community don’t feel like they have a voice in what happens.”

Like the neighborhood it serves, the bar would rather embrace than reject its role as a bastion of diversity.

“We have anything from blue-collar construction guys, our PBR drinkers, to older folks who listen to Motown and old-school rap,” Seidner explains. “We’re one of the last of the ‘Cheers’-style bars.”

Bad things happen west of Massachusetts Street, too. Last October, a 51-year-old Lawrence man of Chinese descent was found guilty of involvement in human trafficking and promoting the sale of sexual relations at Spring Massage, a now-shuttered parlor at Sixth Street and Lawrence Avenue. Assistant Douglas County District Attorney Mark Simpson said the man, Chen Li, “unlawfully provided financial support and transportation” supporting the forced sexual labor of women at the business. At such operations, the female employees are victims recruited to work in the United States under the guise of legitimate employment, then kept against their will and “coerced into involuntary sexual services they did not wish to provide,” Simpson explained at the time.

photo by: Nick Krug

In 2013, Li and a co-defendant, Guihong Xiao, pleaded no contest to charges of promoting prostitution after a police raid on two massage businesses in Bonner Springs. In recent years, police have shut down similar enterprises in Kansas City and Wichita. The city of Lawrence is currently exploring its options to toughen laws against illegal parlors. These incidents have done nothing positive for the public perception of massage businesses, especially ones run by non-Americans who already suffer from discrimination.

It’s no wonder, then, that the owner of Happy Feet Spa, which operates from the elbow of Haskell Square’s L, declined repeated requests to give his name or to be interviewed for this story. A female employee put it this way when reached by phone: “The owner says we will not talk to you because we only speak Chinese.”

Happy Feet regularly advertises on Craigslist its “lovely Asian professional massage therapists.” Despite having been in operation for four years, longer than most of its peers at the strip mall, the spa has not registered as a business with the state of Kansas. In the same period, it has generated 28 reviews on RubMaps.com, a popular “fantasy” massage website.

The spa is open until 10 p.m., seven days per week, cash only.

“Personally, I hate methadone. I just hate everything else worse: death and destruction and people ending up in jail,” Campbell says.

At Center for Change, he manages about 175 clients who, like he once did, hope for something better. Campbell knows methadone, a drug prescribed to help users overcome opioid dependence, has a checkered history with the American public — a national controversy that in several cases has reached all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“The community has been a (expletive) to get to,” he concedes, “but (methadone) is the accepted method that the government has said, ‘This is how we treat this issue.’

photo by: Nick Krug

“You can’t put a methadone clinic on Mass. Street — the people wouldn’t go for that. So it’s kind of a common-sense approach to locate here,” he explains matter-of-factly of Center for Change’s spot between Happy Feet and the liquor store at Haskell Square, where it has operated for about three years.

Campbell says the location also makes sense for Road to Recovery, which sits just on the other side of Playerz. He co-owns the abstinence-based drug treatment clinic that has 40 clients with Ana Ahrens, a nurse practitioner who emigrated from Morocco to Wichita and has been working with addiction issues for the past 18 years. Unlike people, opioid addiction isn’t susceptible to bias based on economic or ethnic stereotypes, she observes.

“We have an epidemic in Kansas,” Ahrens says gravely. “It’s all over Lawrence” and it touches everyone — “I have patients who are kids of dentists, businessmen and attorneys.

photo by: Nick Krug

“I look at Haskell, and Haskell is nothing — it’s not a bad area at all. There’s nothing to be scared of. It’s just circumstances.”

Methadone therapy, she argues, acknowledging the complexity of its relationship with the community, “keeps mothers with their children, keeps families intact, keeps addicts from being incarcerated.”

Two decades ago, Campbell was one of them, he says. “But I decided to not allow my life to be a waste.” Today, he sees himself as evidence that people can be redeemed, a reason to keep fighting in spite of the world’s perception. Can such redemption also work for places?

“People will equate one incident with a whole neighborhood,” he says of the January shooting in the parking lot, with a note of uncertainty. “And of course the first thing they did was turn the TV cameras right on our sign.”

When you live your life on the short end of the L, oftentimes it’s lonely. Your sign faces the wrong direction for the steady stream of drivers headed north through East Lawrence to downtown, and you’re set back too far from Haskell Avenue to grab the attention of those going south. What you really need is foot traffic, another reason for shoppers to gravitate to the southwest leg of the strip mall. Something, perhaps, a Dollar General could bring.

photo by: Nick Krug

For a long time, Haskell Square has had a liquor store in this spot, and at least partly for the reasons given, it’s come with a revolving door of names: Danny’s, then Haskell, now K.

“I was looking for a business on the side, and a buddy told me there was a store here that closed,” current owner Manish Kumar says of the bygone Haskell Liquors, which he insists his shop is not a sequel to. Kumar opened last May, making him the strip mall’s newest remaining tenant. Two months later, his brother Red Dumpa moved from southern India, where his family owns a construction company, to help man the store at night. Kumar’s venture hasn’t exactly taken off, but he’s not planning to bail anytime soon.

“It’s all right,” he says reticently of his store’s sales. “Not too bad, not too slow.”

Both cited the potential arrival of Dollar General as a reason to stay optimistic, and they weren’t the only Haskell Square tenants interviewed for this story who take that view. A national low-cost chain saving a struggling group of small business owners? It’s not without its dissonance. It’s also a welcome reason to hope.

photo by: Nick Krug

“That’s for sure going to help our business,” Dumpa says, staring gamely out into the empty parking lot on a recent sunny afternoon, the parked cars of the K-10 Connector the only bright spots to see.

photo by: Nick Krug

How much Dollar General would help the neighborhood is more difficult to project. It’s about a mile from Haskell Square to the nearest significant sources of fresh produce — the Dillons at 1740 Massachusetts St. and the nearby farmers market that pops up Thursday evenings at Cottin’s Hardware. In other words: a 40-minute roundtrip walk to buy a head of lettuce. Plans to build a downtown grocery store that would serve East Lawrence could solve the top half of the food desert issue, but the intersection of 19th and Haskell and the neighbors who surround it would be too far south to benefit. The Dollar General store planned for Haskell Square would not offer fresh produce, the company confirmed.

There’s also the threat that prolonged, successful new development could push low-income residents out of the area, where rents already are rising. So far this year, the city of Lawrence has spent $100,000 toward a three-home affordable housing complex on the east side. Last month, a consortium of 22 local religious congregations asked city and county leaders to commit 15 times that much, $1.5 million, to affordable housing in 2017. Obviously, the need is great.

photo by: Nick Krug

Suvarna calls it “a dream” to make Haskell Square a solution to one or both of those issues. Since purchasing the strip mall about 10 years ago, he’s actively pursued plans to lure a grocery store and an affordable housing development to the site. In 2010, Suvarna says, he applied for a neighborhood revitalization grant to add five businesses and 35 jobs to his property, but the grant was awarded instead to a westside business owner, he recalls. He hopes a Dollar General would bring more visibility and density to Haskell Square, “and then the mom-and-pops will come.”

“East Lawrence is good people,” Suvarna reflects. But when the bias of history is working against you, good isn’t always enough. “East is poor, west is rich. This is true in the whole world, not just America,” he continues. “When populations are growing, they start in the east and grow west. And what is poor in the east is left behind.

“Imagine, at city meetings, to hear: ‘Let’s do something in the east.’ How many times did Lawrence say that? Never.”

At this strip mall that’s survived half a century of unrest, things again could be changing. Riding out the next 50 years will take persistence, grit and more than a little luck — being in the right place at the right time, maybe knowing the right people. But just over the fence, the red brick beacon of the Miller house is proof that you can hunker down and weather it out. Even when bullets are flying in your direction. Even in the ever-shifting tensions between north and south, east and west.

— Public safety reporter Conrad Swanson contributed to this story.