By Tom Oder
For the second time in two years, the Dunwoody Green Market is changing locations.
The Green Market will open the 2013 season on April 17 in the parking lot at The Shops of Dunwoody, 5500 Chamblee-Dunwoody Road. Vendors will set up booths behind the Bank of North Georgia and across from Sunshine Car Wash.
“We are happy to be back in our old neighborhood,” said Market President Paula Guilbeau, owner of Heirloom Gardens.
The Shops of Dunwoody site is near the Dunwoody Post Office in Dunwoody Village. The market operated in post office parking lot from 2009 until July of last year.
The site worked well for vendors because people would come by with their dogs and strollers while they were out doing errands, Guilbeau said.
The market relocated to the Spruill Gallery for the last half of the 2012 season because the post office needed the vendors’ space for parking due to the closing of the Shallowford Road postal facility and the relocation of those operations to the Dunwoody Post Office.
“We were very grateful for the opportunity to be at Spruill,” Guilbeau said. However, she pointed out that customer traffic dropped off by as much at 75 percent after the move. “Spruill was out of their pattern and they didn’t like driving that far,” she said of market customers.
“We felt like we had to do something to save the market,” she said. “Then the Simpson Organization reached out to us.”
Simpson is the owner and leasing management organization for the shops of Dunwoody.
The new location will be smaller than both the post office and Spruill sites. There will only be room for 20 to 25 vendor spaces at the Shops of Dunwoody location, Guilbeau said.
She said that she and the Market Board members will visit the site this weekend to begin figuring out exactly how many vendors the market will have when it opens for the 2013 season next month.
The market operates on Wednesdays from 8 a.m. until noon. The season will run until Nov.13.