Broadway draws two retailers.

Byline: JOE HARWOOD The Register-Guard

Surf's up on Broadway.

Two clothiers with a bent toward the tropical have set up shop at the west end of Eugene's downtown mall in anticipation of the street's reopening to vehicle traffic.

Pineapple Kiss Swimwear, which moved from the Fifth Street Public Market, opened about a month ago at 174 W. Broadway. Flamingos, formerly doing business as Maximo's at the Gilbert Shopping Center on Highway 99, opened next door, at 164 W. Broadway, last week.

"We think it's going to be a great location," said Sharon Hulsey, who manages both stores. "The street already looks so much better."

Work is nearly complete on the $2.4 million Broadway project, which will reopen the mall to auto traffic between Oak and Charnelton streets.

Pineapple Kiss, owned by Marcia Knee, sells mix and match swimwear as well as a series of popular clothing lines that include Paul Frank, Angie and Temptation. Flamingos, owned by Hulsey and Knee, sells an eclectic assortment of name-brand women's and men's new and used clothing at discount prices.

Both stores carry a large assortment of hard-to-find petite and plus sizes.

Hulsey and Knee also manufacture and sell their Mizu Sports and Apparel line of swimsuits, skirts, Hawaiian shirts, fleece jackets and other articles.

Hulsey said the location - formerly used by Symantec Corp. as a training facility before the company moved to Springfield - appealed to her and Knee for several reasons, paramount among them the reopening of the street.

Knee, who had been selling her mix and match swimwear at Fifth Street for about six years, wanted more space to expand clothing lines to give the store year-around appeal.

Hulsey, who was making swimsuits and other apparel for Knee and others while managing Pineapple Kiss and Maximo's on Highway 99, wanted to consolidate operations. "Going back and forth was wearing me out," she said.

The Broadway space, owned by Eugene businessmen Tom Connor and Don Woolley, met all those needs. And rent for the combined 7,000 square feet of space also came at a "significantly lower" cost than the Fifth Street and Gilbert locations, Hulsey said.

Each store has about 3,000 square feet of display space. Hulsey and three seamstresses use about 1,000 square feet at the back of Flamingos as a clothing manufacturing facility.

Hulsey said she expects the stores to thrive once word gets out.

The downtown mall has been tough on retailers over the years, and many have closed or moved on. A shortage of on-street parking and lack of vehicle access to Broadway has sent shoppers to other destinations. Aggressive panhandlers and loitering youths have also kept customers away.

But Hulsey noted last week that those problems have been more or less solved. Broadway will reopen within the next few weeks, and the mall's troublemakers have moved elsewhere.

"They are not here now and I don't think people are going to let them come back," she said.

A couple more positives that could help downtown businesses include Spectrum Contact Services, which opened a 227-worker call center in the former Kaufman's building at 133 W. Broadway, and the expected December completion of the new Eugene Library immediately south of the mall.

"Our older customers are following us and we're finding new customers that wouldn't normally shop at Fifth Street," Hulsey said.

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Sharon Hulsey's daughter, Kirbie, works at Pineapple Kiss, which recently moved to Broadway and Olive.