Bringing Back Dickson Street Fayetteville Developer Focuses on City?s Entertainment District

If Greg House has his way, Fayetteville will look a lot more like New Orleans or San Francisco than it will Dallas or Los Angeles.

House, a former surfer who worked as a roughneck to earn the money to buy his first vacant lot, is a striding force behind the renovation of historic buildings around Fayetteville’s entertainment district — Dickson Street.

“It’s delightful to live downtown in those two cities,” he says of New Orleans and San Francisco. “We’re trying to bring New Orleans’ Southern architecture here. I enjoy a challenge. It’s something other than the standard pop-up, tilt-out buildings.”

Two words are key to House’s developments: mixed use. The buildings frequently have retail stores or restaurants downstairs with offices or apartments on the second floor. In addition to being mixed use, House’s developments incorporate what is known as “neo-traditional” principles, or the “village concept.” The village concept usually refers to the planning of new neighborhoods to resemble older neighborhoods.

The theory is the automobile has ruined the American landscape by spawning strip malls, parking lots and secluded neighborhoods where garages are the primary feature of the house. Proponents of the village concept believe people want to return to a more intimate, pedestrian-friendly way of life. In other words, they want to walk — and actually be able to get somewhere.

But will they?

Neo-Dickson Street

Enter House and three partners — Dr. David Buckley, John Tyson (vice chairman of the board of directors for Tyson Foods Inc.) and an anonymous partner. They spent about $1.7 million last year renovating the Shipley Bakery building on Dickson Street. The Bakery Building is now a restaurant, retail and office complex.

Next in line is a four-story, 54,000-SF mixed-use complex planned for the 200-block of Dickson Street. The project will span the parking lot between Restaurant on the Corner and The Grill and preserve those buildings. In addition, part of the complex will be constructed east of The Grill. The complex will cost $4 million to $5 million by the time it’s completed around the year 2000.

In the interim, they’ll begin work this August on the former Superior Linen Service building at the corner of West Avenue and Watson Street, a block north of Dickson Street. That 10,000-SF building, which will cost about $800,000 by the time renovations are completed in six months, may also be a mixed-use center, says House.

Before these projects, House and three partners — Buckley, Richard Alexander and Rob Merry-Ship — renovated The Rollston Building (off Dickson Street between Rollston and Campbell avenues) and constructed Campbell Avenue Terrace apartments next door.

The 10,000-SF Rollston Building houses two restaurants — Cable Car Pizza and Nick’s Steak and Seafood — downstairs and six apartments on the second floor. It is valued at $800,000. The 14,000-SF Campbell Avenue Terrace building, which contains 14 apartments, is valued at $1.2 million.

“Most people wouldn’t build residential in that zone (C-3, commercial) because the land is expensive and hard to get,” says House. “We’re making the most use of the land.

“Our hope is by having residential use along with commercial use, you have life on a 24-hour basis. You have more pedestrian traffic, less vehicular traffic. You have more pride in the community because people live there. There’s less worry about crime. You have a vibrance because people live there.

“I think there’s a real trend, especially among the baby boomers, toward this kind of an environment instead of the three-bedroom, ranch-style house you have to get into your car to get to.”

The village people

The village concept — pioneered by architects such as Peter Calthorpe, Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk — has its roots in the neighborhoods of pre-World War II America. These architects design suburbs that look like traditional neighborhoods — the kind that existed before the automobile became the American icon it is today.

In a neo-traditional neighborhood, streets are laid out on a grid, intersecting at right angles rather than curving and meandering. (There are no culs-de-sac in neo-traditional neighborhoods.) This allows for more than one main entrance into a neighborhood. Many narrow streets are used to channel traffic instead of a few wide streets serving as main arteries. Mixed-use zoning is incorporated to allow small businesses to operate in residential neighborhoods. Sidewalks are important. Houses are built to a scale that allows for a “public realm” to encourage walking. Homogeneous housing is not allowed.

“If our towns are to survive, we need to remember what made them special in the first place,” says Dan Bennett, dean of the UA’s School of Architecture and a supporter of neo-traditional neighborhoods.

The village concept takes into consideration regional architecture styles and geographic features, making it different everywhere it is used.

Parking problems

Fayetteville’s General Plan 2020, which outlines policies for growth management in the city, says “in areas that need redevelopment, a policy that calls for mixed use is desirable,” says Alett Little, the city planning director. In the document, drafted in 1995, planning commissioners backed off to a degree from supporting the village concept as much as they did in the previous, 2010 plan.

Little says the main problem is parking.

“I love the neo-traditional concept, but it’s not exactly practical,” says Little. “It’s not reasonable to expect people to walk as much as they used to walk. We’re spoiled brats. I don’t think we can return wholeheartedly to the policies of the ’40s and ’50s because we’re different now than we were then.

“Generally, neo-traditional just means it’s built to look like it would have looked like in the early 1900s through the 1940s — the closer living conditions families experienced before we grew so large.”

Little compares the village concept to urban renewal policies of the 1960s, which made pedestrian malls of downtowns across America and caused businesses there to flounder.

“I love what’s happening to Dickson Street, but the lack of parking could ruin it,” Little says, noting that the largest parking lot in the area — at the corner of Dickson Street and West Avenue — was constructed by the city.

“I disagree with that,” says Bennett of Little’s parking prediction. “Fayetteville is the only city that I’m familiar with that does not have a central business district parking ordinance. In most cities, you park in more remote lots and walk three blocks down to wherever you’re going. I argue people will walk a mile if it’s pleasant. It’s not the distance. It’s the quality of the walk. What Greg is doing is making the walk more pleasant.”

“There’s plenty of parking,” says House, citing a study by David Glasser, an urban planner with the UA’s Community Design Center. “The problem is people want to park right in front of the door where they’re going.”

“What Greg is doing is improving the character and pedestrian quality of Dickson Street, and the city is fighting it,” says Bennett. “The city does not recognize off-street parking as legitimate parking.”

“It’s just something we should be concerned about,” Fayetteville Mayor Fred Hanna says of the parking situation. “I think, for the downtown area, the way they’re doing this mixed use, I don’t see a problem in the near future. I just think we need to make people aware of where the parking spaces are.”

Bennett says cities ruined their downtowns in the 1960s by trying to “imitate the shopping malls.”

“There’s no analogy there to what Greg is doing,” says Bennett.

Bennett refers to House’s renovations as “urban infill.” He says House is “knitting infill development into the existing fabric of Dickson Street using neo-traditional planning principles.”

Little Rock is the only other city in Arkansas where such mixed-use projects are under way on a large scale, says Bennett. Moses-Nosari Real Estate Inc. has been doing similar renovations in the Little Rock River District.

Har-Ber Meadows, a planned community in Springdale, is the closest thing to a neo-traditional neighborhood in Northwest Arkansas, but it doesn’t quite fit the criteria since the community doesn’t have a retail center yet, says Bennett.

Benton County

Mixed-use developments are happening more by accident than by intention in Benton County.

Richard Werts, who was the developer of Kingston Center in Bentonville, says that 28,000-SF office complex has a dry cleaners (6,000 SF) and a tanning salon (2,000 SF) because all the office space in the building wasn’t rented. Vendors to Wal-Mart Stores Inc. have leased the remaining 20,000 SF of the $813,000 center. Werts and partners Gregory Peck and Richard O’Dell are now working on Kingston Center II, a 43,000-SF retail center in Rogers.

“I don’t know of anybody who is doing mixed use on purpose in Benton County,” says Werts.

House sailing along

House, who grew up in Indiana and Ohio, went to Hawaii at the age of 19 to surf and sail. While there, he met Richard Alexander, who had been living in Australia, New Zealand and Southeast Asia. The two men were living on their boats in Honolulu’s Ala Wai Yacht Harbor in 1973.

House left Hawaii in the middle of winter for the oil fields of Wyoming, where he worked as a roughneck to earn the money to buy his first property, a vacant lot in San Franciso where he built a house.

For the next few years, House split most of his time between Hawaii and San Francisco, where he was renovating houses and commercial buildings.

In 1979, House began a journey around the world in his yacht — a 51-foot ketch. He set sail from Newport Beach, Calif., and landed in Hawaii 17 days later. That time, House stayed there for about a year. When he left Hawaii, he sailed to Tahiti. There, after slowly traversing about one-fourth of the globe, he decided to stop and return to San Francisco.

“I ran out of money,” says House. “Also, I got bored. I was single and didn’t have enough life experiences to want to sit out in the ocean for months on end.”

Alexander decided to buy property in Northwest Arkansas during the mid-1970s and move here. House came to visit him in 1981 and decided to stay, earning bachelor’s and law degrees from the University of Arkansas while renovating buildings here.

While in Fayetteville, House says he met the woman who would later become his wife, Beverly Block, and that’s the main reason he stayed here. The couple — with the appropriate surnames of House and Block — started their development, construction and brokerage company, Houses Inc., in 1986. Block takes care of the interior design aspect of projects.

“Prices started escalating in this area because of the boom in Northwest Arkansas,” says House. “We saw value in the older structures that were under-utilized. You could buy the older structures and remodel them for less, and you were in an area that had some charm.”

Also, House says there were tax breaks available for renovating older buildings.

After renovation, House and his partners retain ownership of the buildings. He says he likes to give people a choice “over strip centers and malls.”

Besides the three projects mentioned, House has others that aren’t mixed use. The most notable of those is the $1.5 million renovation of Fayetteville’s Ozark Theater building. The four-story building on College Avenue will be used for office space for TransMontaigne Oil Co. His partners in that venture include Alexander, Merry-Ship, Dale Caudle and Barbara Rudolph.