PROGRESS: UnityPoint opens clinic on Hamilton Boulevard

UnityPoint Clinic - Marketplace, 3035 Hamilton Blvd., opened its doors May 2 of last year. The clinic is adjacent to the Wilmes Do It Best hardware store at the northernmost end of the building. 

The 7,742-square foot space actually houses two clinics, family medicine on one side and urgent care on the other. 

"We are so excited to be able to serve our patients in this new clinic," Jane Arnold, regional vice president of ambulatory operations at UnityPoint Health -- Sioux City, said in a statement around the time the clinic opened. 

Three providers -- Stephen Pallone, MD, Jeanne Rasmussen, ARNP and Cynthia Lewin, ARNP -- work at both clinics. The clinics together have a total of 10 exam rooms, featuring an X-ray machine and an onsite lab. The façade is mostly windows, which bathes the waiting area in natural light. 

UnityPoint said the facility is intended to "offer additional convenience to residents on the city’s northside."

"We already have a footprint in Morningside with our Sunnybrook Medical Plaza," Pallone said. "Our Marketplace clinic gives Northsiders the same convenience."

This new location provides ample parking and bus line service along with the added convenience of being close to UnityPoint at Home and UnityPoint Health – St. Luke’s, he added.

"We even have a fire station located across the street from us," Pallone said. "The location is ideal for us."

In the coming year, Pallone said the clinic's hours of operation likely expand to meet client needs.

"Illness doesn't always happen during normal hours," he said.  

With the opening of the UnityPoint clinic, the former Shopko building is almost fully occupied. The first new retailer to set up shop there after Shopko left was Wilmes Do It Best, a full-service hardware store, in the spring of 2020. By the fall of that year, Once Upon a Child, a popular consignment store for children's items, was preparing to open on the other end of the building. A Planet Fitness gym subsequently opened on the building's southernmost end. 

In 2019, Shopko, a Wisconsin-based retail chain, liquidated its holdings after declaring bankruptcy. The former retailer's leased space along Hamilton Boulevard didn't sit empty long before its owner, Klinger Companies, Inc., announced it would be re-outfitted and subdivided into smaller retail spaces. The 103,000-square-foot building was thought to be too massive to attract a single retailer. 

"Anybody's going to have to subdivide a place like that," Klinger president John Gleeson said in 2019. "It's a given."

Gleeson noted in 2020 that many retail properties in Sioux City have stayed empty a very long time -- "retail's a tough challenge," as he put it. Nevertheless, the owner of the former Shopko managed to pull off something that owners of vacant retail properties often struggle to accomplish: it's filled with reputable tenants and bright, attractive storefronts.