The Double Life of McCrory Village

If you pull into the parking lot at 3500 McFarland Boulevard today, you’ll find yourself staring at the dignified facade of Northport City Hall and the Civic Center. There are manicured green traffic islands, three stately flagpoles catching the breeze, and a steady stream of folks walking in to renew a business license, dispute a water meter reading, or attend a Monday night council meeting.

To the casual passerby—or anyone who moved to Tuscaloosa County after the mid-1980s—it looks like a purpose-built monument to local municipal administration.

Those of us with a few more miles on our odometers know better.

Long before folks gathered in those halls to debate city zoning ordinances or hold community banquets, that exact footprint smelled distinctly of roasted redskin peanuts, warm popcorn, floor wax, and clean motor oil. Before it was the political heartbeat of the city, that sprawling asphalt expanse was the kingdom of shopping carts, chrome bumpers, and weekend errands: McCrory Village.

When McFarland Was Pushing North

To appreciate what McCrory Village meant to Northport, you have to rewind the tape to a time when crossing the Black Warrior River was a deliberate journey rather than an idle five-minute jaunt.

Back in the 1960s, suburban life was finding its stride across West Alabama. McFarland Boulevard was evolving into the retail corridor of tomorrow, cutting wide swathes through red clay and timber. Out at the junction where Highway 43 branched off toward the northern hills and rural communities like Samantha and Northside, Northport needed a place of its own. It needed somewhere folks could run their Saturday morning business without having to sit in traffic all the way across the river into downtown Tuscaloosa.

Enter the modern mid-century strip shopping center: flat-roofed, expansive, wrapped in gleaming metal signage, and fronted by a sea of freshly striped asphalt wide enough to land a crop duster.

Perched on the rise overlooking the crossroads, McCrory Village opened its doors. It wasn’t just a place to buy things; it immediately became the town’s communal front porch. On any given Saturday morning, you couldn’t throw a rock across that parking lot without hitting three station wagons belonging to folks you sat behind in church or stood next to at the local high school ball games.

The Linoleum Wonders of McCrory’s 5 & 10

The crown jewel of the whole enterprise, naturally, was McCrory’s.

Walking through those double glass doors was an assault on a kid’s senses in the best possible way. It was an honest-to-goodness five-and-dime, engineered back when variety stores sold everything from dress patterns and galvanized buckets to parakeets.

You had the wooden display bins partitioned with clear glass dividers, brimming with wooden rulers, plastic dime-store army men, sewing notions, bobby pins, and bags of marbles. In the back, under humming fluorescent tubes, sat the pet section, where tiny aquariums bubbled and real live canaries and parakeets chirped away, filling the aisles with the occasional stray feather.

Then, of course, there was the lunch counter.

McCrory’s lunch counter was a masterclass in mid-century culinary efficiency. You had the tall, red vinyl chrome stools that squeaked if you spun on them too fast (a temptation no eight-year-old in history ever resisted). Behind the counter, a waitress wearing a white apron and sensible shoes could slide a basket of crinkle-cut fries, a grilled cheese pressed flat with a spatula, and a foamy glass of fountain root beer down the laminate before your rear end was even fully settled on the vinyl.

If you had a shiny silver half-dollar burning a hole in the pocket of your jeans, McCrory’s was nothing short of paradise.

Bicycles, Fan Belts, and Saturday Morning Chores

While McCrory’s held court on one side, the village had a little something for the rest of the household checklist.

Right next door stood OTASCO—the Oklahoma Tire & Supply Company. For the grown-ups, OTASCO was where you picked up a set of spark plugs, a replacement fan belt, a gallon of exterior house paint, or a dependable Briggs & Stratton push mower to keep the Bermuda grass in line.

For the kids, OTASCO was holy ground for one specific reason: the bicycle wall. Rows of shiny cruisers and banana-seat stingrays sat elevated on steel racks, chrome handlebars gleaming under the lights. You would stand there, hands shoved deep in your pockets, practically trying to will one into the trunk of your dad’s sedan while he paid for a socket set and a pack of oil filters.

Flanking the anchors were the neighborhood essentials:

• The Neighborhood Grocery: Saving home cooks a river crossing every time they ran low on lard, self-rising flour, or a jug of whole milk.
• The Local Drugstore: Complete with greeting card racks, aspirin, and prescriptions filled by pharmacists who knew three generations of your kinfolk by their first names.
• The Barber and Beauty Shops: Where neighborhood news, ball scores, and garden updates were exchanged at roughly the same volume as the hum of the electric clippers.

You could get your hair trimmed, buy a fan belt, pick up a sack of groceries, eat a club sandwich, and pick out a school notebook, all without ever moving your car out of its parking space.

The Retail Tide Turns

Nothing in retail stays still for long. As the 1970s bled into the 1980s, commercial habits began to wander.

Across the river, modern enclosed shopping malls arrived with climate-controlled concourses, tiered water fountains, and sprawling department stores. Suddenly, open-air strip plazas felt a little less futuristic to a generation of shoppers who wanted to browse under skylights and eat soft pretzels in seventy-degree air-conditioned comfort.

By the early 1980s, foot traffic had thinned. The bustling rhythm that once defined McCrory Village began to quiet down. Stores closed their accounts, the bright neon letters flickered out one by one, and for a brief stretch, that prime piece of real estate at Highway 43 and McFarland sat wondering what its second act might look like.

In many towns, an aging mid-century strip center met a grim fate: left to gather dust, sprout weeds through the asphalt, and eventually yield to the wrecking ball.

Northport, however, had other plans.

1985: The Million-Dollar Reinvention

In 1985, city leadership made an audacious, practical gamble. Northport had long outgrown its cramped, traditional administrative quarters down near the old downtown tracks. The city desperately needed a centralized home for municipal government, a larger council chamber, and a public venue capable of hosting civic gatherings, banquets, and trade exhibitions.

Rather than buying raw timberland and starting from scratch with taxpayer money, the city saw good bones right in the middle of town. Northport bought McCrory Village lock, stock, and barrel for $1 million.

What followed was one of the most effective municipal adaptive reuse projects in the county’s history.

Construction crews moved in, knocking out retail partition walls, pulling down suspended drop ceilings, and re-engineering the long commercial strip. The mismatched storefront facades were enclosed, unified, and refinished.

Where the old retail bays once stood, Northport built:

• City Hall Administrative Suites: Creating modern, accessible offices for city clerks, revenue collectors, planners, and city leaders.
• The Northport Civic Center Auditorium: A spacious, flexible community hall equipped to hold hundreds of folks for high school sports banquets, civic club luncheons, gem shows, and local voting precincts.
• Municipal Infrastructure: Utilizing the vast acreage out front and around the back for city fleet operations, emergency staging, and municipal access.

If These Walls Could Talk

Today, if you sit in the Civic Center waiting for your number to be called at the counter, it’s hard to imagine that the very spot where you’re holding your paperwork once held a wall of model airplane kits or a glass counter filled with hard candies sold by the pound.

The building looks entirely different now. It wears a dignified exterior, bordered by neat brick accents, deep-tinted arched windows, and the state and national flags flying proudly over the center turnaround.

Yet, beneath that civic dignity sits the unchanged framework of a neighborhood shopping center that helped carry Northport through the 1960s and 70s. It bridged the gap between a small, sleepy river town and the thriving city we know today.

Next time you head down McFarland Boulevard and ease into the turn lane toward City Hall, look past the brick trim and municipal signage for just a second. You might still catch the faint, phantom echo of a lunch-counter bell ringing, the squeak of a shopping cart wheel, and the hum of a community that found its rhythm right on that very corner.