By NEIL MODIE
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

To many outsiders, Lacey is merely an ever-sprawling suburb cluttered with strip malls. It lacks a focal point, other than St. Martin's. Even the community center is outside the city limits and the only movie theater, Lacey Cinemas, is in Olympia.

If there's a "downtown" Lacey, it's South Sound Center, a shopping mall with three stores and dozens of empty storefronts flanked by Sears at one end, Mervyn's at the other end.

Other shops exist in separate buildings ringing the enclosed, mostly hollow main mall.

Across Sleater-Kinney Road from South Sound is a Fred Meyer shopping center with a hodgepodge of surrounding shops.

"People don't shop here in Lacey a great deal anymore because there isn't that much to shop for," says Jim Johnson, who since 1975 has owned the Red Wing Shoe Store on the perimeter of South Sound Center. He has survived because "my shoe store here is sort of an institution, and because of my product."

Bob Blume, the 70-year-old president of Capital Development Co., owns about a million square feet of Lacey commercial properties, including both the South Sound and Fred Meyer malls. Capital has been negotiating with Target Stores and other large-scale retailers to fill the gaping vacancy at South Sound.

That doesn't please city leaders, who'd like to see Lacey's downtown become more pedestrian-friendly and less car-oriented -- meaning fewer, not more, "big box" stores like Target.

St. Martin's College, which owns nearly half of the downtown area's commercially zoned land, sold the sites of City Hall and the adjacent Lacey Timberland Library to the city, and it leases unused dormitory space to other government agencies.

This college is growing as Lacey grows: It is nearing completion of a $10 million fund drive for a new library.

The college provides Lacey with a civic center of sorts. St. Martin's Pavilion is used not only for sports and other college events, but also high school commencements, conventions and the Capital Food and Wine Festival each October. Likewise, the college's Norman Worthington Conference Center hosts community social events and conferences.

City and business leaders would like to turn largely undeveloped Sixth Avenue into Lacey's new main street, running about six blocks from South Sound Center to City Hall.

Johnson scoffs at that idea, as well as the notion that the city's nucleus someday might be Meridian Campus, a new, 1,153-acre industrial park, residential and golf course complex in the early stages of development north of I-5.

"The idea of making that the hub of the city is absolutely ridiculous because South Sound Center is where it is. This is downtown Lacey," insists Johnson.

Nonetheless, Meridian Campus will have a big impact.

Owned by Vicwood Development Corp. of Hong Kong, it eventually will have an estimated population of 7,300, pump up the city's industrial tax base and send the upper end of Lacey's residential real estate market into the $400,000 range. Meridian Campus includes the new, 18-hole Vicwood Golf Links adjoining the renowned, 18-hole Meriwood Golf Course.

The development became part of Lacey through annexations that extended the city limits several meandering miles to the northeast, all the way to the shore of Puget Sound.