There will be no new store any time soon to fill the space at Florin Road and Riverside Boulevard left vacant by the Nugget Market more than six years ago.

Clark Wallace, whose group In Hand Development made an offer to buy the half of the mall that includes the former grocery store, tells Pocket Online this morning that the deal fell through. “The contract was terminated for a lot of reasons,” Wallace explains, “but none of them I’m going to go into.” (Wallace told Pocket Online in August that his group expected to close escrow in October.)

The man from In Hand, who was excited about a new business opportunity in the Pocket area, is still bullish about the business potential of our area. “We still think the Pocket area is a great place for business, but in these economic times some people are a little scared.”

As Pocket Online discovered in August, a lot of work went into the proposal to buy the store (click here to see the new plans In Hand Development proposed) so there are a lot of questions about what went wrong.

We called the legal representatives for Balthazar Holdings, who Pocket Online discovered in July owns the Nugget space and the shops to the west. (Click here for our search for the owners, who changed their name several times.) The senior partner for Slater Cosme, PC who represents the current owners is out of the office until next week but we contacted the home of Balthazar Holdings owner Maria Mallace and spoke with her husband Alexander Mallace. Mallace tells us the deal didn’t fall through on their end, “I don’t know why the deal fell through, they couldn’t get the funding I suppose.”

We will continue to investigate just what went wrong and if anyone will step forward to fill this conspicuous hole in our business community.

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