PROGRESS: UnityPoint becoming the newest tenant in former Shopko building

The 7,742-square foot space, which will house a family medicine clinic on one side and an urgent care clinic on the other, is slated to open in May. UnityPoint announced its plans for the clinics -- the healthcare provider's seventh facility in Sioux City -- in November. 

The family medicine clinic will have four doctors, while the urgent care clinic will have two. The clinics together have a total of 10 exam rooms, featuring an X-ray machine and an onsite lab. The front entrance will boast "a glass front entryway that will flood the waiting area with sunlight," a UnityPoint spokeswoman said. 

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

"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," UnityPoint said in a news release. 

In 2019, Shopko, a Wisconsin-based retail chain, liquidated its holdings after declaring bankruptcy. The former retailer's leased space in Sioux City at 3025 Hamilton Blvd. hadn't sat 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 simply too large to attract a single large retailer. 

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

With the addition of the UnityPoint clinics, the building will have around 23,000 square feet left to fill -- an occupancy rate of nearly 80 percent. The former Shopko building is a part of the Marketplace Shopping Center, which has been owned by the Gleeson family since 1962.

And although Gleeson noted in 2020 that many retail properties in Sioux City have stayed empty a very long time -- "retail's a tough challenge" -- it appears that the owner of the former Shopko has pulled off something that often can't be done with vacant retail properties: it's now home to an array of solid, reputable tenants. 

"I feel very good about the progress that we have made in the past few years with the 103,000 SF former Shopko building," Gleeson wrote in an email in February. 

The first new retailer to set up shop in the former Shopko was Wilmes Do It Best, a full-service hardware store, which opened in the spring of 2020. It claimed 30,000 square feet on the north end of the building. 

By the fall of that year, Once Upon a Child, a popular consignment store for children's items, was getting ready to open in a 5,000-square-foot space. A sister store owned by the same company, Plato's Closet, had already been in business within the Marketplace complex for years. 

A Planet Fitness gym subsequently opened on the building's far south end. 

Mike Wilmes, proprietor of Wilmes Do It Best, and Amy Albers, co-owner of the Plato's Closet and Once Upon a Child franchises, said there was one factor besides location that made the ex-Shopko an especially attractive place to set up shop: the landlord, John Gleeson, who has a longstanding reputation for keeping his properties in good order. 

"He's probably the nicest landlord I've ever known," Albers said in 2020.