From grocery store to concert hall?

A Wilmington building that used to sell groceries could soon be staging live concerts by name acts.

At least that's the vision of Chris Virta, who owns an 11,200-square-foot building at 1108 Princess St. Currently the home of Storm Strength & Fitness, Virta said he thinks the building would make a perfect concert venue.

"It's just a big shell," Virta told me recently as he pointed out renovations to the building, as well as its high ceilings and where he envisions a future stage might sit.

Built in 1950 as an A&P grocery store, the building was later purchased by the Wilmington Housing Authority. When Virta purchased it in 2015, he said, it had been vacant since 2006.

"We gutted it," he said, filling seven 30-yard trailers with debris and installing a new HVAC system.

He said he got the idea for a venue because "I love music. I used to go to House of Blues all the time."

After seeing a story I wrote last year about Wilmington's lack of a midsize concert venue, Virta said he started talking to other venue owners and city officials. He said he's been told the building's capacity is 299 at present, but could be 750 if it had a sprinkler system.

Since the Blue Eyed Muse at 208 Market St. (formerly The Throne Theatre, Ziggy's by the Sea and many other venues) shut down in 2017, Wilmington has been without a full-time midsize concert venue. If "large" for our area is defined as say, 1,200 (Greenfield Lake Amphitheater) to 1,500 (Cape Fear Community College's Wilson Center) and "small" is 200 or less, midsize for the Port City could perhaps be defined as being between 400 and 1,000.

The Brooklyn Arts Center has a capacity of about 750, but it's mostly used for weddings and other events, with only two concerts currently on the schedule. Area music venues with a capacity of around 200 or less include Reggie's 42nd Street Tavern, The Whiskey, Bourgie Nights, the Calico Room, The Juggling Gypsy and, in Wrightsville Beach, the Palm Room.

Plans were announced late last year for a new, 6,780-seat amphitheater in North Riverfront Park to be run by Live Nation. It won't open until 2020 at earliest.

On the midsize concert venue front, however, not much has changed in the past two years. Underlining the need for such a venue? On June 19, the reggae artist Matisyahu, who's played locally in both the old Muse space and at the BAC, is set to play an outside show at jazz bar Burnt Mill Creek.

"That's my No. 1 complaint about Wilmington. We need a 500-capacity room," said Catherine Hawksworth, who owns the Modern Legend record store downtown and helps book shows at several Wilmington venues. "I think we're mainly missing out on the people who could tour through somewhere like Wilmington, but instead are hitting Myrtle Beach or Charleston."

As for the music hall that Virta envisions, the current zoning might require such a venue to have a kitchen and sell food, exist as perhaps a brewery or be some kind of multi-use event facility, he said. He said he sees the BAC as a potential model for what the building could be.

"There's a lot of contingencies," he said. "A lot of it boils down to money."

Virta said he wants to hook up with "somebody who knows the business" who wants to lease his building. He said he'd consider putting a new roof on his building and/or installing sprinklers to up the capacity.

He plans on moving Storm Strength & Fitness to another location.

Not long ago, Virta said, he got an offer on his building from a representative of Dollar General for more than $1 million. He turned it down, though, "because I don't want it to be a Dollar General," he said.

Contact John Staton at 910-343-2343 or John.Staton@StarNewsOnline.com.