Roswell, Georgia – First came news that Mayor Jere Wood was quietly pushing a sale of the old post office property on Grimes Bridge Road to North Fulton Community Charities, which serves 4,300 poor families in the region – a use opponents consider inappropriate at a site adjacent to residential neighborhoods and professional office buildings.

Now comes word that one of metro Atlanta’s best-known porn and sex novelty purveyors has leased vacant space a few hundred yards from the post office property along Holcomb Bridge Road. “I think this whole corridor is going to take a double hit,” says Chris Watford, a landowner whose outdoor outfitter business sits between the two sites.

“This is going to add to the decline of this area. If we’re not very careful about some of these decisions, it can change the tone of Roswell.” The City Council will decide March 1 what to do with the post office property, which is being supported as the charity’s future home by several area churches.

But it appears the council can do nothing to stop the Starship Enterprise store that will open soon at the former Atlanta Bread Company site. Sexually explicit material is protected under the First Amendment. Under Roswell’s zoning laws, businesses that limit such material to less than 25 percent of their total space, and pornographic videos to less than 5 percent, qualify for a general business license.

The Starship Enterprise store will meet that threshold, said Atlanta attorney Alan Begner, a veteran defender of the adult entertainment industry. “There’s not gong to be any live adult entertainment there,” Begner said. “I find that, aside from an initial shock by citizens, they quickly determine that a store that just sells things that you take home and use in the privacy of your home are not objectionable over time.” In fact, Begner points out, Starship Enterprises operated a store with some sexually explicit merchandise just a mile east of its new site, in a small strip center just west of Ga. 400 on Holcomb Bridge Road.

The store was named Galaxy, and its lease was highly restrictive. Several residents who are horrified by the new Starship Enterprise operation concede that Galaxy operated under their radar, and some didn’t even know it was there. But the new operation will bear the infamous Starship Enterprise name, and the city is not happy to have it. “If they go in and they have 25.1 percent of their merchandise in porn, then we’ll shut them down,” said Roswell City Attorney David Davidson. “It’s something we’ll have to go in and continually monitor. If we have to do an audit, we will.” Even if the Starship Enterprise store keeps its inventory below the legal porn threshold, the other 75 percent will leave little to the imagination about what its core business is all about. Sex. The home page of the company’s Web site features lifelike drawings of two women. One is naked and the other has her shirt lifted.

To move past the home page and enter the Web site, viewers must acknowledge a disclaimer: “I understand that all models at this site are at least 18 years of age.” What they enter next is a world of vibrators, paddles, restraints, floggers, hardcore videos and the like. “I wish we could restrict them more than we can,” Wood said. “I suppose they’re locating there because it’s a good retail location.”

A lot of locals are concerned about the store’s sign, because that will be the only connection many passers-by have with the operation. Begner said the sign will not be objectionable. “There’ll be no naked women or sex acts [depicted],” he said. “I understand that a citizen might object to the store, but there’s not going to be any other thing to object to other than that the store is there.”

Rocky Kaufmann, the real estate agent who gave Starship Enterprises the lease at the Atlanta Bread Company site, which his father owns, said he was initially reluctant to have such a tenant but changed his mind after visiting one of their area stores. “Everything they do is by the book,” Kaufmann said. “I personally don’t have a problem with a shop like that. I think we have other things to be concerned about.”

Tell that to the neighbors and nearby business owners. “We have got to start caring about this corridor,” said Watford, 39, a businessman who was born and raised in Roswell. “It’s important. It’s not historic or quaint, like Canton Street, but it’s our main corridor from Ga. 400 and we have to do what we can to keep it up. I think people [at City Hall] are forgetting about Holcomb Bridge Road.”