Developer Leon Charkoudian, real estate broker Fred Rowe, and property manager Dianne Little discussed with me their work to lease out an 11,000 square-foot space in the Birnie Building at 11 Pearl Street, at Apremont Triangle in downtown Springfield. This is part two of a series (here’s part one) sharing some of their story.
Interior of the Birnie Building, a potential urban grocery at 11,000 square feet
Heather Brandon: Is the grocery the [intended] anchor for that building?
Fred Rowe: Yes, it is.
HB: Do you want to keep the current tenants?
Leon Charkoudian: If we can improve the retail space with higher-value tenancy, that would be good. For the time being, they’re carrying the property! We’re not going to kick them out and say, I’m only going to have absolutely the best beauty shop there is. What good is that? How long have you been in Springfield?
HB: Five years.
LC: Five years. Well, you know, as I was explaining to you about 122 Chestnut, we’ve been here now 20 years in this particular property. We’ve built all over the northeast with the team. What you see is a cyclical situation. Back in ’82, ’83, there was something called Downtown Central, was that the name of it—?
HB: Springfield Central.
LC: It did its thing, and the city was coming back, and the rest, and then it died through the late ’80s, early ’90s. And then Mayor [Michael] Albano comes in, and, "Well, we’re going to make this the Comeback City," and you know, everything went up again. Then, all of a sudden, the end of this administration, a collapse.
Each time, we participated in the thrill, and all of a sudden, it’s over. It disappears for external reasons, other than any individual property reason. It isn’t the previous owners of the Birnie Building—it wasn’t their fault; they did whatever they could do to make that profitable.
The difference here, as both Dianne and Fred have done, is we hoped that if we made this effort, going back to that simple concept that if we could just "unblight" them—that’s not a word, I know—if we could just get rid of the blight that’s represented by these two buildings, that the rest would come together, because so much of it is already done! That’s the irony of it. So much of it is already done.
Exterior of the Birnie Building on Pearl Street, looking to Chestnut Street
FR: UMass [Urban Places Project] was in town, and they put a plan together for pretty much all the open spaces in the downtown area, and did a really nice job with it. It’s part of our proposal to the city.
LC: Professor [Henry] Lu, this was in 2000, he brought his students down here, and he may well have said, "Where can I find the greatest challenge to our students, to see what they could do in landscape design and regional planning?" They generally don’t recommend getting rid of buildings, but they did recommend getting rid of these buildings [at the parking lot, 33 Pearl Street, pictured], which would make more parking for that area. Ironically enough.
A 2000 student plan for the 33 Pearl Street lot included trees and eliminated two garages
The lot at 33 Pearl Street as it appears today
HB: He’s done some great stuff. I like what he’s done, bringing students into Springfield. I asked him why that’s not happening anymore, and he talked about the lack of funding.
LC: Yeah, that’s a good point, I had forgotten about that. There was funding at that time. And then right after the city goes into the chutes, you lose this kind of activity. While everyone was talking about the Urban Land Institute study, and the fact that there was a [downtown market-rate] housing study [PDF] done—who remembers this, as they say in history classes?
HB: How did this [student work] strike you, and what did it do for you?
LC: It was part and parcel of our design. This would have been the core, and then the whole neighborhood would have been a part of the technology district that they proposed.
HB: What was the problem that they had to solve?
LC: They wanted to take this dull, dreary streetscape and give it some life, some use, some meaning. One could argue, as a good professor, he sat up there in Amherst and said, "Now, where can I find the dreariest place in the world?" And he came down here.
From the lot at 33 Pearl Street, another parking lot next to the Harris Green building
As envisioned by a designer, the Harris Green building and adjacent lot
HB: The dreariest place, but, you know…
LC: With the greatest potential. The students really jumped into it. One of the things, for instance, that was implied in the request for proposals for [the parking lot at 33 Pearl Street] was, what experience do you have for running a parking facility? Well, we have a huge parking facility right nearby. The implication was that we had to secure this. Securing that with a fence goes contrary to the open landscape schema of this thing. In the proposal [for the lot’s disposition], I said I’m happy to talk to the [Springfield] Parking Authority on how to secure it. Just putting a fence up isn’t the right way necessarily to go, because you have this particular study which said, "Open everything up." Make it an interlaced series of walkways, treed areas, and parking lots, as well as buildings and all that stuff.
Dianne Little: This concept is the concept of the State Street Corridor. I went to a meeting at [Chief Economic Development Officer David] Panagore’s office. They start with State Street Corridor, and then they want it citywide. This is the whole thing, without fences, pedestrian-friendly. Having parking on the side and in the back, a sidewalk and trees, and the pedestrians can walk. This whole thing of not putting up fences is very big in their plan.
FR: [The students] did a lot with lamps, too, to light up the area. None of that was ever implemented, but…
LC: These are ideas, not specific proposals.
HB: Somebody put some thought into it.
LC: Exactly. Lots of thought here, don’t you think? The area is seen, not just by Longmeadow people and Granby people, as a place that they shouldn’t be, but by the nefarious, it’s seen as, well, that’s where we’re going to be located! That’s how sad it is.
One can argue that the little bit of government assistance that we wanted, if of course we could have cleaned up the stonework, would that have made a difference? Yes, it would have! But as long as Video Expo is there, there still is a problem, you know? You can see in the history, we lost the control of the Harris Green building, because for a short period, in the one year we had the purchase and sale agreement for that property, we worked with the owner at that time, and even with their headquarters in Rhode Island, to move them up on Taylor Street or further up on Worthington.
There was some conversation. They considered it. Naturally it would be one of the most important things we could achieve, if we could move them out of the neighborhood.
It didn’t work out, for various reasons. Among the reasons, they were there before there was an ordinance in the city of Springfield on adult entertainment. When the ordinance was passed, some hotshot prosecutor said, "You don’t have an ordinance, you’ve gotta get out of there." You can understand the city’s position, they thought they were doing the right thing.
The doorway to adult entertainment in the Harris Green building
Well, [Capital Video, owners of the store] were very smart people, and I wish the city had realized it. They took the city to court. The court grandfathered them there, because the ordinance came in after they had located there. They got scared, and they said, "Look, we can’t risk moving, because we’re going to lose our grandfathered position here."
DL: However, Amazing.net, or whatever it’s called, the video store—I don’t frequent it often to know what the name of it is—was called up on charges, a number of things, and it was supposed to go before the License Commission. We were all ready to go. Then it got postponed; nobody knows why. They had a drug deal—somebody was arrested in the property, in the building, with a drug deal. Don’t you think they’d want to hurry that along? We have a pretty good network in the neighborhood of people who hear what’s going on. "When is that coming up?" You know? "Why aren’t they closed down?" Nobody knows why.
FR: Outside, we have both male and female prostitutes standing across the street, by our building, and we have a vacant lot that we use for parking. They stand there, and they wait for [customers] to come out, and they solicit them, and they try to take them out behind our building, and do their business. It’s unbelievable.
The Harris Green building and its miscellaneous tenants
DL: And this is all two blocks from the police station. I call that blatant. When you’re trying to develop a nice neighborhood, rent a nice building, and you have to walk through a couple hookers to get in the door, or you’re afraid you’re going to be solicited on the way out…
LC: Talking about establishment people, the second floor in the Green building was a historic location for a lot of the early labor movement activities, as far back as pre-World War II. The labor union’s headquarters, the AFL-CIO local chapter, was here up through the ’80s. When we were looking at the building, they still had the marquee with their names on them, and the various trades. Some of the leaders—and they were in their 80s, if not older—were considering this [Birnie Building] space, that we were considering for the urban grocery, as a museum of the labor movement.
I can still remember—I’m coming back to the Video Expo—the older guys, and there were two younger guys there, standing in front and looking across at the Video Expo. It was like an informal vote: "My wife won’t come down here if we do this here;" "Yes, mine will;" "Mine won’t." Those were not their exact words, but words certainly were said. Two of the guys said, "It doesn’t make any difference." It wasn’t a formal vote; I could just hear the conversation, and they never came back. But they had come twice to look at that space, and they thought it would be ideal, because, again, it had proximity to where they historically were, and the office back in the ’20s was just down Bridge Street.
HB: You’ve encountered a lot of people who are turned off by the scappiness around the area. It sounds commonplace at this point, because it’s the story of Springfield, in a way. But what is it that’s kept you here, kept you committed or invested? What is it that you believe in? Do you have some vision, or experience, that’s fueling your desire to keep trying?
FR: [Charkoudian] points out, all the time, different areas of Boston that were like this, different areas of New York that were like this, and have had a renaissance and have become beautiful places that people want to go. We do think that can happen.
If it ever can get off the ground, you have the Union Station project right there, the federal courthouse, the museums—which are now expanded with the auto museum—we’re right smack in the middle of all of it, you know? It’s all part of the Urban Land Institute issues where there’s no linkages in the city. Well, we’ve been saying that for a long time, there’s absolutely no linkages. We could start to create those, and this is so well-situated.
The other thing is, from Leon’s perspective, the city very much wants regular market-rate housing downtown. [122 Chestnut] represents, I believe, the only truly market-rate building downtown. It’s working people, students, all that sort of thing. So [Charkoudian] has a lot to protect here. To keep this the way it is, he’s had a heck of a struggle to keep the occupancy up here. Everything else around it’s gotta be nicer to keep this the way it is. If the city has any hope of expanding on what Leon has here, these areas gotta become nicer. You know, these neighborhoods have to be walkable to everybody, you know? That’s kind of a vision. We’re not gonna take a step back. You gotta keep moving forward.
DL: The thing is, this neighborhood has incredible potential. And I said to Leon, it could be just this far away. It would lend itself beautifully to an artists’ colony, to a Starbucks, to an antiques shop, framing places, like on Bridge Street, galleries, and you have the gorgeous Kimball, and this building. Trees and grass in the middle of the city, brick, someplace you can just go and walk right across the street; it’s wonderful. And the fabulous architecture, and Mattoon Street, which is beautiful, with the trees and the lights and whatever. The potential here is incredible, if you get a whole bunch of people together who want to move in that same direction, and have that same vision.
HB: In finding people, potential occupants—your urban grocer, for instance—would you agree it’s important for that person also to have that vision?
FR: Absolutely.
LC: Oh, absolutely.
HB: Since you’re getting a lot of "nos," and I’m assuming these are folks who don’t get the vision—
FR: They see today; they don’t see next year, right.
HB: Right, and so they feel pushed away because of, "This isn’t going to be friendly to my business," rather than, "I’m going to work with you, and create something here, and I’m going to get in on it now."
FR: Right. The way it presently stands, we’ve been unable to find any government assistance to renovate that building. The way we look at it is, anyone we bring into it now, we’re going to have to do the renovations ourselves, so those people in fact are going to be partners of ours. We’ve offered free rent to people to get up and going, things like that, but they have to have the same vision, they have to be single-minded. Otherwise it’s not going to work. It’s just going to be somebody taking free rent for a while, and then they’ll be gone in a year, or in a year and a half, or whatever. It really doesn’t serve our goals at all.
We’re still confident that we can find that person out there. The outcome of the parking lot is going to be key. If we’re successful in securing that parking lot through the bid, then we can offer people something that we haven’t in the past: dedicated parking. We’ll keep it well-lit and all that, and just—we can make it work, you know? We may go into the grocery business, who knows?
