Critic Blasts the Design and Planning Effects of CVS

Mark Lamster, architecture critic for the Dallas Morning News, pens a scathing critique of the CVS drugstores that populate urban street corners and anchor suburban strip malls all over the country:

If I were to tell you a drug dealer had recently colonized a popular street corner, thereby precluding all civic life around it, that would sound like a familiar scenario, conjuring visions from crime dramas likeThe Wire.

But what if the drug dealer in question wasn't some low-rent street pusher, but one of America's largest corporations, and what if it was operating not just in some impoverished neighborhood most of us don't visit, but all across the city?

What if that dealer was CVS?

Lamster goes on from that beginning to provide an honest appraisal of both the interior design choices and the site plans that produce a footprint in the built environment that encourages all of the vices of sprawl, and none of the health benefits a neighborhood drugstore should be aiming to deliver. A recently constructed example from Dallas, the Bishop Arts store on the corner of Zang Boulevard and West Davis Street, provides a case study in the urban design failings of CVS.