East Albany Roses shopping center set for demolition

ALBANY – After nearly a half-century, the Roses Discount Store location in east Albany is set for demolition, along with the rest of the shopping center where it was built in the mid-1970s. 

The store on East Oglethorpe Boulevard had been a center of complaints for several years before its final closing in 2024, including a failing air conditioning system, leaks in the roof and potholes in the parking lot. Last year, the city of Albany received complaints of a broken sewage pipe that was spewing into the parking lot at the west end of the buildings that are now owned by an Atlanta-area developer.

Now the wrecking machinery has come to take down the buildings. 

For decades, the Roses retailer was a mainstay on the east side of town in an area that didn’t have a lot of places where residents could shop.

The store was where people made everyday purchases without having to drive a significant distance, Dougherty County School Board member and Albany Recreation and Parks employee Velvet Poole said. Children who attended Dougherty High School were among those who frequented the store.

“I spent my childhood and into adulthood shopping there, and after that I took my kids and my grandkids,” she said. “It was a pillar for east Albany.

“We used to leave school and go to Roses and get all those things we needed.”

After complaints about conditions inside the store, it was closed for repairs in August 2023. It was not long after that time that the store closed for good.

“They did close temporarily,” Albany Ward I City Commissioner Jon Howard said. “They re-opened, but (later) they put a notification they would be moving to the old Harvey’s.”

The new Albany Roses location opened at 2525 Dawson Road in 2024.

After the closing, officials had hoped that the shopping center would be fixed up and revitalized. But that never happened.

One bright spot, which Howard, who remembers the store being open when he was a high school senior at Dougherty High in 1974, is that it will no longer be used as a dumping ground. During a visit with a Herald reporter in 2025, the commissioner pointed to a number of tires as well as old toys, bags of garbage and other debris, that had been dumped at the back of the buildings in the shopping complex.

The area is one that will be targeted in an east Albany cleanup effort planned for the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, Poole said.

And, maybe one day, a new development will come in with new businesses.

“We need somebody to come and build something, and we will support them with our dollars,” Poole said.