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 three of a series (here’s part one and part two) sharing some of their story.
Heather Brandon: Did you work directly with UMass to do the Apremont Triangle student design work?
Leon Charkoudian: No, this was a study and we happened to attend [the presentation]. I said, I want my own set of those [plans]! I wanted to purchase my own set. It was a huge presentation. All of these [designs] were up on boards, all around.
Fred Rowe: MassMutual gave [UMass] a vacant unit in Tower Square, right in the mezzanine shops, and they had a presentation in there. It was nice. We later had [a map] done for us at the Pioneer Valley Planning Commission—it has a cartographer. All of these IT companies were located at the STCC industrial [park]—it’s the fiber optic loop.
LC: The part in pink encompasses the fiber optic loop.
FR: In 2000, it was a big thing. We were in a district that had the highest connectivity for the Internet and it was very important to a lot of tenants.
LC: At the time, there were zero so-called transportation costs for high-speed Internet connection here. One particular company, that’s now located in East Longmeadow, was paying $1800 to $2100 a month to get the service out there that’s here for free. They later opted to move from their small location into an industrial park, still paying the higher fee, as opposed to moving in here.
How can you blame them? Did they go through the same thing, saying my workers can’t—well, yes, they did! They could just see themselves with a driver, picking up a client at Bradley, swinging around this way, coming to this parking lot, oh, video over there! What kind of video is that? Oh, it’s a porn shop! That killed that deal! We have a lot of stories, if you want to know. That’s exactly how the president described it.
I don’t think that I ever felt we had anything significant yet to show, even though we’ve done an incredible amount of work. I mean, I know what we’ve done. Look at it, it’s still empty. And it’s so frustrating. As [122 Chestnut property manager] Dianne [Little] said, we could have filled that space there—the bars have still come back and asked for the old Frontier Lounge location.
Dianne Little: And we might have mass exodus from [122 Chestnut] of all my nice… people who don’t want to live in that kind of neighborhood.
LC: There was that obvious, protect this investment, in going over [to East Longmeadow], too, but on the other hand, you’ve gotta do that right, in its own purpose, in its own vision.
HB: Have you talked to Whole Foods?
FR: No.
DL: Don’t tell me there’s someone you missed!
FR: I only know that the nearest one is in Hadley. From what I know, they locate in spots like that; it’s hard to find the ones that’ll do the urban locations.
HB: But they do. I don’t know about that square footage, but it might be worth trying, if you don’t have anything to lose. In Pittsburgh‘s East Liberty, a neighborhood that had been urban-renewaled to death, a Home Depot located, as well as a Whole Foods. It was a real risk they took, and it serves the people who live right there. When you’ve got people making renovations to their home, they love to just pop down to Home Depot. And with the Whole Foods you attract folks who are looking to maybe spend a little bit more money but also eat healthy.
DL: I think Whole Foods has a lot of clientele from Mattoon Street, and I think they have some from [122 Chestnut].
HB: People go all the way to Hadley. People would come from pretty far to a Whole Foods.
LC: At the time we began this, the Whole Foods was in Boston, in Newton specifically; it was a Bread & Circus. I was working with them, believe it or not, on organic grown bananas from Latin America. I cannot remember if I actually asked them, but I can tell you what we did do, if not with Whole Foods, or with Bread & Circus. We did go to Big Y, and asked them if they wanted to do a "Little Y." And they talked about it a little bit, and they said no. In the meantime, they had come up with… Green Harvest?
HB: Fresh Acres.
LC: Yeah. I was going to say, Green Harvest was… there was one that I did go to. So the answer is no, I don’t think I’ve really talked to Whole Foods. But I haven’t seen what Big Y has done up there, I don’t know. They rejected the location as well as the concept.
FR: It’s a much larger space, too.
HB: It’s a safer, less risky location in so many respects. They’re not really serving the city. It seems clear that they’re serving Wilbraham. It’s oriented toward people who are—
LC: No, they’re not. They’re serving the suburbs.
DL: Because you’re going to drive right by it as you’re coming home from work to Wilbraham.
HB: So I would say that they’re not going to be sharing the vision of a center city…
LC: I agree. I’m trying to answer your question that we’ve reached out to a Whole Foods type of market.
HB: Right. And I’m not even saying that that’s what you need, I’m saying that they might be on the same page. They might consider it. If you look at the downtown market-rate housing study (PDF), or the Urban Land Institute recommendations (PDF), this area is a priority, and has so much potential. They might actually listen.
LC: In [our bid proposal], you have a representation of the study done in 2000. Those other two studies [ULI report and downtown market-rate housing study], once they’re out, would be something to put into our presentations to Whole Foods.
HB: Yeah. Shaw’s Wild Harvest is another similar one—it’s in the region.
DL: Where are they located?
LC: They’re not here…
FR: There’s only one Shaw’s in the area, period, and it’s in Enfield. They haven’t really moved up here. They’re all over Maine.
DL: There’s a new one in Saco, Maine. If the one in Enfield [were like that one], I’d be shopping there all the time. Great stuff.
HB: But you’ve gotta have somebody that can work in that square footage.
LC: When we say urban grocer, the implication in there is a small space.
DL: A neighborhood grocer.
Interior of an 11,000 square foot available space in the Birnie Building
FR: We’ve heard the comment that we’re trying to cater to a higher crowd, but that’s not really true. The poor people in this area shop at Spring Street Drug. If you ever look at the prices there, it’s much more than at Big Y or other places. The people that don’t have transportation have to walk to Spring Street Drug and pay more!
LC: That’s a very good point. That justifies the governmental participation here. You see? It justfies it. It’s not going to just take care of the wonderful people on Mattoon Street. It’s going to take care of—Chestnut Park, Chestnut Towers—the elderly at Museum Place. We went to the Vietnamese community center, where they are very well-organized, and we went to every single Vietnamese grocery store. I was hoping to maybe make it a little more upscale with them. That went nowhere. I’m just tossing out the work that’s been done.
FR: The Highland [Park] Markets, which are a smaller market down in Connecticut; they’re very nice. They at least came up and looked.
LC: One of the wonderful ones, and they’re right in Connecticut, east of Hartford, they have three or four in the Manchester area. They actually came up.
FR: State Street Market in Northampton, too.
HB: So what are they afraid of; is it safety?
LC: Well, it’s a combination of safety, I think that’s part of it. If we’d get really down and tough with them on it, they’re afraid of theft. They’re afraid of a lot of theft. Even though you may have cameras nowadays, why put up with it? Ultimately, they’re not sure there’s a market here. Safety, parking…
FR: And a little bit of stigma because of the tenant across the street, you know?
DL: I would think safety, because I go to all these meetings: people wouldn’t feel safe. People maybe in this neighborhood, but somebody else wouldn’t feel safe coming to this neighborhood to shop. They’d be afraid, particularly after dark, to walk out of the market with their bags, their pocketbook, and go to their car. They’d be afraid that something’s going to happen to them. The perception of downtown Springfield is horrendous. My family lives in Wilbraham, trust me. They get out of town before it gets dark.
HB: It’s a little overblown.
LC: Just a little.
FR: A lot.
DL: That’s what I fight here, the perception. What [Charkoudian and Rowe] are fighting is the perception that this is not a safe—I mean, the safer the city gets, the more cops are on the streets, the more headlines are crime’s going down—the more it’s all going to help.
LC: The more retail we can get in this area is going to help. It’s self-generating, self-fulfilling. If we can fill the space, then we’ll have less people that we don’t want around here. We had a program on the second floor of the Birnie Building—leftover offices of doctors and dentists, lots of small little offices. It would lend itself to executive office suites. We had a developer that was going to do everything. It turned out he wasn’t that well-off at all, and also worse than that.
The point I make is that if we could do this—because we’d have the parking—you’d have 35, 40 business professionals coming and going. Do you know what that would do to clean up this neighborhood? Just coming and going! Forget about the support of the small retail shops, what that would do for the economic development of the downtown, small purchases and sales. Just the presence of the people coming and going.
DL: That was the premise of the meeting that I went to at the [Office of Planning and Economic Development]—making it pedestrian-friendly. Because if you have pedestrians coming and going, the corner drug dealer doesn’t want to be there, because there’s too many nice people walking by; there’s too many people that aren’t his kind. He’s going to find another corner someplace else, and that was the whole premise of making it more pedestrian-friendly.
LC: That’s primarily aimed at the State Street Corridor.
DL: The State Street Corridor is, if I understand this, a model for what they want to be continuing throughout the city. This is not a two-year plan, this is a 15, 20 year plan, and [they’re] trying to sell it to all the neighborhoods. It makes every neighborhood better. They took the major road in Springfield, which is State Street—it goes right from the river all the way up to Wilbraham. I went to the meeting because we’re two blocks from State Street. Anything they do on State Street is going to filter out and help us. It was interesting. The pictures were great; the concept is wonderful.
LC: I’m so glad. So my challenge to the Springfield Parking Authority about keeping [the lot at 33 Pearl Street] open, and not fencing it in, will have good ears there, receptive ears. Good!
The parking lot at 33 Pearl Street
DL: They want to make the area safe and comfortable enough that you don’t need the iron fences and all the gates.
LC: It’s too late for the museum Quadrangle.
DL: Yeah, but they’re a world unto themselves. They have their own little city there, their own little world.
FR: Their security guy’s been good enough, though, to try to help us tie the security systems—they’ve got great security there.
LC: That’s a good point.
DL: AQCA is working with them. If you’re a member of AQCA, you get a discount, ten percent off certain things. That shows that we’re all in the same neighborhood.
