Just spitting distance from the municipal boundary of the independent city of Richmond, Virginia is a small, inconspicuous shopping center called Triangle Park. Truth be told, all of the photos in this article depict properties just outside the commercial property called Triangle Park. However, these photos still sit within the same triangle shaped superblock where Patterson Avenue meets Three Chopt Road and Horsepen Road, so I feel impelled to reference Triangle Park, because it’s vastly older and more established than the properties featured here. (Folks who grew up in West Richmond or the neighboring suburbs of Henrico County will know the area, because the beloved grocery chain Publix has a location nearby.) At any rate, immediately north and west of Triangle Park is a separate commercial node, and it’s much newer than the long-established strip mall next door. Passing through the area, I knew something was afoot because the area looks simultaneously old and new—like older structures underwent recent redevelopment.
Is it just me, or does the structure in the photo above smack of an adaptive reuse? I hate to use that colloquial verb “smack” because it feels like a pejorative—like there’s something conspiratorial taking place in this transformation. But it was the first verb that came to mind when I drove past this intersection in an area altogether unfamiliar to me (as is the case with most of Richmond). It’s got weathered brick combined with significant intervention around the windows, up to and including a material that renders them opaque but still respects the masonry of the old apertures. And there’s that round, alabaster sign near the gable. The building might be decades old, but Ukrop’s Market Hall is fairly new, having opened during the unexpectedly risky Christmas season in 2020—a time when business restrictions and social distancing related to COVID were at a fever pitch. Despite the challenging start, the Market Hall has persevered for more than half a decade, but still feels as tidy as if it had opened last week.
It’s a shiny market hall, but, for the people of greater Richmond, a familiar name, and, of course, a memorable one. Not a lot of Ukrops out there. The Slovak family founded its first specialty market in 1937—another risky era to start a business—in South Richmond. For decades it expanded on site to accommodate a broader customer base with more merchandise, but only in the 1960s did Ukrop’s Market pursue a second location. The Ukrop family continued growth conservatively: ten locations by the late 1970s, and up to thirty locations in Central Virginia (including outposts in Fredericksburg and Roanoke) as Ukrop’s Market branded itself in line with other nationally recognized supermarkets. The family distinguished its business by introducing a robust array of chilled, prepared foods for sale in the late 1980s, at a time when most chain supermarkets had little comparable to offer. (Many still don’t.)
In 2010, the Ukrop family sold off its retail locations to conglomerate Ahold. Most of them transformed almost overnight to other, bigger, brands familiar within greater Richmond: primarily Martin’s Food Markets (part of Ahold family best known for the two Giant supermarkets), then eventually to big names like Food Lion and of course Publix. In fact, immediately south of Triangle Park, in a larger shopping center on the opposite corner of Patterson and Three Chopt, the Google Street View reveals that shiny new Publix in a 2023 image, then a Martin’s Food Market in July 2014, while the grainy images of April 2009—the early days of Street View—show the vaguely visible “Ukrop’s” sign. Therefore, the family-run grocer wasn’t just familiar in a general sense to suburban Richmonders, it was well-known to this exact intersection. With the 2010 buyout, “Ukrop” lettering quickly disappeared. But the Ukrop name didn’t fade to immediate obscurity, because Ukrop’s Homestyle Foods LLC has continued successfully up to the present, with a large commercial kitchen a few miles east of the Patterson/Three Chopt intersection in Henrico. And the commercial refrigerators of supermarket chainss throughout Central Virginia—Food Lion, Kroger, Publix—have continued to sell Ukrop’s Homestyle Foods and bakery items.
After a decade of operating successfully as a specialty product within other supermarket distributors, the descendants of the Ukrop family decided to try their hand once again in direct retail. And they chose the spot where I just happened to drive by to witness that strange public-market looking building—the building the family repurposed.
Why do I call it “strange”? Well, it undeniably has the look and feel of a market hall, with that boxy structure, the vaulted ceiling and the tall windows. But most market buildings of this typology don’t sit at the corner of two suburban collector roads in the same vicinity of strip malls and 1950s upmarket housing. Market halls are usually right downtown or in urban neighborhoods that developed in the 19th century. What prompted the birth of Ukrop’s Market Hall, and all the redevelopment scrubbing that yielded the attractive white signage?
The answer comes from a simple Google Street View time-warp back to June 2018, when it turns out all those mercantile features belonged to an entirely different use: a church. Bon Air Baptist Church apparently encouraged worship at multiple locations in metro Richmond, and this sanctuary represented the core of its Village Campus. As this 2018 Church Council report indicates, the Village Campus at Patterson and Three Chopt was not bringing in enough congregants on Sundays or Wednesdays to justify the maintenance and operating costs; all it was doing was diverting necessary monies from the main location on Buford Road in South Richmond. Bon Air Baptist was apparently the third church to struggle at this Henrico location; in the early 2010s a New Covenant Baptist declined to the point that it sought the merger with (and absorption by) Bon Air. But within five years, Bon Air Baptist determined it was not “able to reach followers of Christ at that location”, prompting the Church Council to put the property up for sale. While the Council’s initial goal was to find a new church or school to succeed Bon Air at the site, the best offer came from Ukrop’s, a family-run Christian business that, while operating 30 supermarkets, remained closed on Sundays and never sold alcohol or tobacco.
It seemed like a perfect fit. Ukrop’s purchased the property for $2 million in early 2019. After the rezoning of the land from light office to medium-intensity commercial (a market eatery draws more traffic during a conventional workday schedule than a church or offices), the Ukrop development team commenced redevelopment to the sanctuary. Does this unconventional conversion fly in the face of Matthew 21:13? Well, probably, but commensurate with rezoning was a likely deconsecration, nullifying the structure’s function as a house of prayer. And Ukrop’s Market Hall is hardly a den of thieves…