from the pr newswire: ATLANTA — Although you won’t find it on their website, or listed in their Annual Report, Atlanta based developer Cousins Properties owns the building that houses the Inserection Adult Fantasy Store located on Peachtree St. in downtown Atlanta. Oddly, despite a renaissance in the surrounding neighborhood they are not interested in seeing their racy tenant leave. At least not anytime soon.
Inserection, which has operated on the site since the early 1990’s and has a lease on the property through 2011, is offering to move out early. “Frankly, we are tired of always appearing to be the bad guys,” says company spokesman Erik Clabaugh with Inserection Adult Fantasy Store. “We are aware of the fact that the neighborhood has been changing, and that our neighbors have spent considerable amounts of time and money improving both the overall aesthetics and feel of the block. We realize that we just don’t fit here anymore, and that we can find a more appropriate place to locate our business.”
Cousins, one of the largest real estate developers in the Southeast, acquired the property in October 2004 purchasing the site through one of their wholly owned subsidiaries Treepeach Holdings, LLC. They plan to eventually demolish the store site to make way for a mixed-use development.
Citing a recent newspaper article detailing a $300,000 facelift at the neighboring Atlanta Shakespeare Company as inspiration, Inserection started to scout other locations to move their porn palace.
Inserection representatives contacted neighboring businesses and Cousins officials to discuss the idea of the move. “At first everybody seemed to love the idea … ” says Clabaugh, but ” … as talks went on we realized that Cousins Properties wanted us to pay them a large sum of money to grant an early lease termination … we just don’t think we should have to pay our landlord to leave a location they intend to level at the end of the lease term anyway. This is the last place that we thought we would find resistance to neighborhood improvement.”
Although he declined to offer specific numbers, citing ongoing negotiations, Clabaugh did indicate that Cousins original asking price for early lease termination was greater than the entire estimated expense of relocating the 17,000 sq. ft. store. Inserection (whose owner is currently serving a 46 month sentence for tax evasion) is no stranger to resistance. For years the adult bookstore chain has waged battles with state and local government in order to establish new locations. Fighting to move out of an area is a new and unexpected challenge for the retailer. “I have spent the past 12 years fighting to open stores,” says Clabaugh. “I didn’t realize it might be harder to close one.”