Bible store ousted by sex shop has home

Shopping center seeks revival with familyfriendly tenants.

Like most brick-and-mortar retailers, Christian bookstore Inspiration House faces a litany of business challenges. Spiritual music has moved to the cloud, killing CD sales. Amazon dominates sales of religious books. Americans in general are growing less devout.

An especially dire threat came this past year, when the fami l y- owned b u s i n e s s l e a r n e d its 8,000-square-foot shop on Okeechobee Boulevard had been sold. The new occupant? Hustler Hollywood, a store for lingerie and sex toys run by famed pornographer Larry Flynt.

Store manager Cyndi Smith says she was given just a few weeks’ notice that Inspiration House would be kicked out of the former Pier 1 Imports near Military Trail. Her father wanted to pull the plug on the 40-year- old enterprise.

Smith said Flynt’s representative told her Hustler Hollywood was hoping for a flurry of publicity based on the drama of a Bible store being booted by a sex shop. The public controversy never materialized, but Inspiration House still had to move out.

“We were ready to give up,” Smith said.

What happened next, she considers divine intervention. Smith and her mother prayed for a minor miracle. In an apparent answer, Amanda Schumacher, the wife of auto dealer Chuck Schumacher, came into Inspiration House and asked Smith if she would be interested in moving a few blocks east.

“She said, ‘I have a shopping center, and I want you in there,’” Smith recalled. “Only God could do something like that. I would have had no idea where to go, who to call.”

The Schumachers were trying to revive the troubled Habit at shopping center at 4001 Okeechobee Blvd., and a Bible