Wendy Parker

For more than 65 years, a shopping center on Roswell Road near the Big Chicken has served as a retail gateway of sorts in East Cobb.

When it opened in 1958, the sprawling facility was called Town and Country Shopping Center. East Cobb wasn’t even a place name then, but a mostly rural area east of the City of Marietta that was beginning to sprout with suburban development.

The place names denoted that too: East Side Elementary School, Eastvalley Elementary School, Eastside Baptist Church, etc. This was the east side of Marietta, which was the absolute hub of Cobb County.

When our family moved to the “east side” in the early 1970s, Town and Country was as busy as the shopping malls that would soon replace it. After living way up in the Canton Road corridor when I was in grade school, I thought we moved to a big city.

My mother, who hailed from a small town in the Midwest, loved Town and Country—there was a Woolworth (and later a Woolco) and a JCPenney and a Dunaway Drugs, where we could eat at the luncheonette if we kids behaved, a Kinney’s Shoes store, as well as a Kroger. Who needed Cumberland Mall when everything was just a couple miles away?

When I was in high school, I enjoyed matinee films at the cinema—less than $5 a ticket!—at Town and Country. Years later, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution had its Cobb bureau located there (during a time in which I worked at the AJC downtown).

Since then, as development and affluent shoppers moved further east, and as East Cobb became even urbanized in some areas, Town and Country fell out of favor.

It was was rebranded as East Cobb Station, to add some labeling prestige to an area that was going through substantial cultural, socioeconomical and generational change. Harry’s Farmers Market took a stab in the 1990s in opening a magnificent store nearby that drew shoppers from all over north Georgia.

In recent years, East Cobb Station has been practically empty, although a Planet Fitness and a few other stores have moved in. It’s been a relatively lonely setting for the gym franchise, which has hung on in spite of the odds that the area, much less East Cobb Station, would mount the kind of recovery needed to sustain such a business.

But that slice of the East Marietta of my youth that has vanished to the wind of memories may be making something of a comeback.

Across Roswell Road at the Powers Ferry Road junction, the redevelopment of the former Harry’s site, with lots of housing, is underway. The Movie Studio Grill, which opened in 2017 as Harry’s closed, is banking on those prospects.

And Hendon Properties, an Atlanta commercial real estate firm that takes older properties and revamps them, is taking a chance at East Cobb Station too.

The firm bought the retail center in 2024, and announced recently that it’s adding some well-known names to its list of tenants. Anchored by a Lidl discount grocery store, East Cobb Station will include the return of Burlington Coat Factory, site of the Woolco and now the home of Andretti Indoor Karting & Games.

Also coming will be a Hibbett Sports store and a 7 Brews Coffee location.

Hendon’s track record has been a successful one, as it’s worked to overhaul properties in Brookhaven, Gwinnett County, Austell and Greenbriar Mall.

Elsewhere in East Cobb, Hendon has ushered in change at Sandy Plains Village, located at the county line with Roswell.

In-store retail has been a difficult transformation in this age of online and delivery sales (and now drones?), and big shopping centers have become massive casualties.

Reviving East Cobb Station won’t be an easy task. It’s more than 200,000 square feet of space that’s been so much of an eyesore, as eastbound vehicles pass by and stop instead at Avenue East Cobb, Merchants Walk and Parkaire Landing and others with more upscale options.

If the newest update of what had been Town and Country is to become a success, then the kinds of stores coming to East Cobb Station are encouraging; they appeal to shoppers of a variety of income levels, and for a variety of goods and services.

I’m rooting for that to happen, and if there’s a way to bring back the drug store luncheonette, it would be perfect!

Related:

• Publix at Woodlawn Point to close for renovations
• Dance Stop Studios to close after 52 years
• Bookmiser reopens five months after fire
• Heavenly BBQ closes after a year
• Wendy’s closes on Johnson Ferry Road
• Kroger’s $23M Parkaire expansion to include fuel center
• Press Waffle Co. closes at Avenue East Cobb