There's something new at the popular Midtown Market near the Old Seward Highway and 36th Avenue: Plenty of parking.

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The store, an international market featuring fresh seafood from blue marlin to king crab, prepared Chinese food, a European-style bakery, and a separately-owned Kaladi Brothers Coffee shop, has been squeezed for parking for years.

No more.

Parent company Sagaya Corp. bought adjoining property along 36th, and last month razed a tire store and emissions test center on that land.

Midtown Market is expanding into the corner lot, first with a parking lot and then probably with an addition to the store, said Paul Reid, owner of Sagaya. Almost instantly, the number of parking spaces jumped from 108 to 288.

The new parking lot is already in use, but will be paved, landscaped and lighted next summer, Reid said.

Yamato Ya Restaurant is also in the yellow and blue building housing Midtown Market.

With Mountain View Sports Center across a side street from the market, and Natural Pantry and other stores in a shopping area across the Old Seward, this corner of Midtown is hopping at lunchtime. The whole Midtown district has turned into a second downtown, with more retail and office jobs than anywhere else in the city. Midtown Market has joined in the growth. "Over 10 years, we've probably tripled the employees that work there," said Reid, who estimated there are more than a hundred now.

The corner of 36th and the Old Seward is about to get busier, too: Another Anchorage entrepreneur, Mark Pfeffer, said he has development rights on property just west of Midtown Market, and wants to put a small retail building there along 36th. Pfeffer said he is working with Reid to prepare their adjoining land for development. He doesn't know yet what kind of business might go on the land he controls.

Reid's preliminary idea for Midtown Market, beyond more parking, is to build an addition to the north, moving Kaladi Brothers Coffee and L'Aroma, the bakery and deli, to it, and maybe bringing in tenants not associated with Sagaya, he said. Then he'd like to expand the meat, produce and seafood departments.

"We'll have a much better entrance and presentation" on the 36th Avenue side of the building, Reid said.

He is happy to make the parking lot more attractive with landscaping and lighting the city will be asking for in new code that has been approved but is not yet in effect, he said. "If you can get a glimpse of the future, you might as well deal with it while you can."

Besides more parking, Sagaya will get another driveway into the store from 36th Avenue, relieving some of the congestion at the only road into and out of the old parking lot, Telephone Avenue. From Telephone Avenue, drivers turning onto the Old Seward can only go right. That's to prevent accidents.

But the right-turn-only sends many people the opposite direction of where they want to go, said city traffic engineer Bob Kniefel. The city hopes to build a new road behind Midtown Market to connect Telephone and 36th avenues and give drivers more options, he said.

New Sagaya was founded by Reid and his mother in 1976 on Spenard Road. They had 13 parking spaces, which soon proved to be not enough.

From that beginning grew Midtown Market, the City Market at 13th Avenue and I Street downtown, L'Aroma Bakery & Deli in the stores and in a southside location, Europa Bakery, Europa Café and a wholesale business.

In about 1991, while the Anchorage economy was still recovering from an economic crash in the 1980s, Sagaya moved to the Old Seward Highway site. Later, it added the bakery and deli. In 2001, when Champions Choice moved out of the Midtown Market building, Sagaya expanded and remodeled at the site once again.

Meantime, City Market opened downtown in 1997.

The two stores are similar today, both featuring Asian and European delectables. Midtown Market has a bigger Asian section, and City Market caters a bit more to sophisticated palates, Reid said. "They seem to like to buy that higher-end food more."

Until now, they shared another characteristic, the tight parking. For one of the stores, at least, that problem is solved.

Find Rosemary Shinohara online at adn.com/contact/rshinohara or call her at 257-4340.

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