Over the weekend the majority of the contents were removed. As of today (Monday June 11th) the shop is locked and 90% empty. Left behind were some rugs on the floor, display cases etc.
This was an expensive and unfortunate problem which in my estimation was caused by both parties.
1) Clearly Tino Venturi, the Owner of that strip mall, and Garvis Sams, his lawyer, knew that such usage was prohibited by the very agreement they signed with the city 8 years before. Venturi clearly knew the usage of the shop was that of a 'pawn shop' as the lease he prepared for the Cruchelow's to sign indicated that twice, once even on the very first page of the lease,
2) It has been testified to before under oath before the Kennesaw City Commission that the Cruchelow's had been bragging in their Kennesaw neighborhood that they had gotten around the Kennesaw ban on pawn shops in that mall.
Neither Venturi nor Cruchelow came out a winner on this issue and it was probably a very expensive lesson for people who tried to make an end run around the Kennesaw Zoning regulations and failed.
The community around Mack Dobbs and Cobb Parkway will not waste any sympathy on either party and they can be very pleased with their outstanding efforts in coming together to make the community a better place.
It’s Official…Cruchelow’s Pawnshop Has Closed
Bill Harris says:http://thekennesawwatch.com/
June 11, 2012 at 5:35 pm
Now that the dust has settled on this Pawn Shop issue it is time to thank the many people in the Summerbrooke, Summer Stream and Mack Dobbs Road areas for all the work that went into having this section of the Kennesaw community come together to ‘encourage’ the City to get the ordnance enforced.
The 2 petitions, letters, emails and those attending meetings made it all work out in the end.
The media also played a very big part in getting the word out to area residents. Both the Kennesaw Watch and the Marietta Daily Journal were extremely active in making timely reports of what was going on with the problem.
If it wasn’t for the media we might still have the City wondering if they could just issue a variance and dodge the problem. With media attention from the Watch and MDJ it became clear to them that they had to act and after 3 months they finally did and now the Pawn Shop is gone.
The community and media did a great job of pulling together!
