Community Pharmacy Heads to Near East Side

Downtown institution Community Pharmacy is moving to Madison’s near east side. The store has nearly a 50-year history, which was located at 341 State Street. They signed a lease on Monday for 134 S. Fair Oaks, a commercial building attached to the new Fair Oaks Apartments. The business applied to rezone the space for general retail use last week. The site, which now has the apartments, previously had the Garden Center and Fair Oaks Nursery. It is across the street from Garver Feed Mill, which opened in 2019 after years of the long rehab process.

Core Spaces, a developer, proposed a 10-story, 481 unit apartment building for the current pharmacy site. The move was finalized after the proposal by Core Spaces. The pharmacy and its neighbor businesses are unsure of their future after this move. The Community Pharmacy worker, Issy Bilek, submitted an application on behalf of the cooperative. The application said that the pharmacy looked for a home on the east side after polling revealed that most of its customers lived in that part of town.

Bilek said, “We kind of fell in love with that spot and that neighbourhood. It feels that you’re in a community there, which is such a big part of our business. We have a really long history, and I think we’re just kind of attracted to spaces that have really long history. That building was a post office for the railroads, and it was a landscaping company’s building, and now it’s ours.”

Within the apartment property, the Community Pharmacy will be the only business there. However, Bilek said that the co-op preferred the site to other retail locations nearby.