First commercial building opens in Harbor Town

Harbor Town in Memphis, Tennessee, one of the first and best known traditional neighborhood developments (TNDs), recently opened its first commercial town center building. After only a few weeks of operation, the building has added a new dimension to the town and its businesses are thriving. The emerging town center exhibits a new form of retail building and new businesses that fit within a TND context. It reinforces the idea that retail works in a new urbanist development. The 10,400 square foot, one-story building is anchored by a small grocery store surrounded on two sides by “ liner” storefronts. Three sides of the building, therefore, are activated with retail entrances (the fourth is directly adjacent to an apartment building). The grocery store entrance faces a parking lot, while the other retail operations wrap around to face Harbor Town Square, the town’s main street. The businesses that have occupied the building also differ substantially from their suburban counterparts. Miss Cordelia’s, for example, the grocery store owned by Harbor Town developer Henry Turley (he could not find a tenant, so he established the store himself), is a hybrid between a corner grocer and a supermarket. It’s closer in size (6,000 square feet) to the corner store, but in terms of services and appearance, it’s modeled after a supermarket. It has well-stocked meat, fresh vegetable and pre-prepar-ed food sections and aisles of brand name goods. “Instead of 125 brands of cereals in three or four sizes, we have 30 in two sizes,” says Harbor Town project director Tony Bologna. To make up for the smaller selection, the store has been customized through active solicitation of customer preferences. More than 200 product requests were made by residents during the first three weeks, and 75 percent of them were fulfilled, Bologna explains. Residents, who previously had to drive seven or eight miles to reach the nearest supermarket, have embraced the store enthusiastically. “The first week, I saw people buying milk and bread,” Bologna says. “The second week, they came out with a bag. Now they have their hands full. People are starting to realize that they can do all of their shopping here.” Revenues increased daily during the first weeks of operation. Early sales figures indicate Miss Cordelia’s will be profitable in the first month, Turley says. “You know when you have a winner, and we’ve got a winner.” Multiple services in one space Four other businesses occupy the building, including Ray Fiore’s Movie & Pizza Company. This firm consists of a pizzeria with about 10 tables, a first-run video rental collection and a sit-down bar in a 2,000 square foot space. Fiore, who has started a half dozen businesses and operates two successful independent video stores, never before had an opening like the one in Harbor Town. Without advertising — or even a sign in front — Fiore did $1,100 in business on the opening day — a Wednesday. By Friday, tables were full well into the evening while other customers lined the walls picking out videos. Fiore jumped at the opportunity to locate in Harbor Town — because he has been a frequent visitor to Seaside, the TND on the Florida Panhandle. “I assumed it would be just like Seaside,” he says. “ There is a little restaurant there that is slammed every day. And now we’re getting slammed every day.” Near the Movie & Pizza Company is the Deliberate Literate, a cafe/pastry shop that also sells books, greeting cards and business services (fax, courier, mail, copies and office supplies). Not long after opening, the cafe expanded its hours. The building also includes a small dry cleaner (packed with clothes after three weeks), and a branch office of a major Memphis bank in a space about the size of a large cubicle. The bank has a cash machine and office hours on Thursday and Saturday morning. All of the businesses exemplify Turley’s concept of fitting as many retail services as possible into a small space. “A typical suburban shopping center is renting square footage,” says Turley. “We are renting merchant count. We are always trying to get them to take less — like everyone else, merchants have been enculturated with the wrong ideas. Everyone thinks bigger is better. A video store is supposed to have 6,000 square feet, and sell only videos. Ray (Fiore) has a bar and a restaurant along with videos, in a third the space.” Low-cost construction The one-story building includes gestures to traditional main street design — such as awnings, vertical brick elements, high ceilings (the building is 16 feet) and a wide porch roof in front of the supermarket where outdoor seating will be placed — but is nothing fancy. The need to place many utility units above the supermarket and restaurant, and a desire to keep the design simple and construction costs down, influenced the decision to build a single story building. “I didn’t spend any more per square foot than you would building a strip shopping center,” Turley explains. “I didn’t want to burden these businesses with the cost of fancy architecture.” Construction costs, not including design, totaled $750,000. Turley is conscious, however, of the need to build multistory buildings in the town center to create a sense of enclosure. Across the street, a three story building is planned, with shops on the first floor, offices above and apartments on the top. Two more buildings will complete the four corners of Harbor Town’s town center. “Now that we completed the first building,” Bologna says, “a developer agreed to come in and build what we want across the street. All of a sudden people are talking to us about other projects.” It has taken Harbor Town a long time — more than seven years since the first homes were built — to begin to create a downtown commercial core. The town now has 410 apartments and well over 300 homes occupied. Turley dismisses the idea that the retail should have been developed earlier. “I don’t know how you could build it earlier,” he says. “Retail is hard to force. If you have a grocery store with not enough customers, the meat is going bad and the fish is going bad.” Bologna adds: “We’ve taken a lot of heat for not having this earlier — but we think the timing is good.” The isolated location of Harbor Town is both a curse and a blessing for its retail. Harbor Town is only a mile from Memphis’ downtown, but is on an island. Few people will cross the bridge to shop — and the nearby downtown areas are not highly populated, anyway. On the plus side, there is no nearby shopping competition for the island’s 2,500 residents. The population is expected to triple in the next decade or so. Prices competitive A university professor who lives in Harbor Town compared the prices of Miss Cordelia’s to a Walmart Superstore eight miles away (the residents’ primary source of groceries before Miss Cordelia’s). The price was 14 percent higher in Miss Cordelia’s — a surprisingly small difference compared to Walmart. The Harbor Town store also is missing the bulk packages and sheer variety available in the big box. The convenience and social benefits outweigh price and selection considerations for many Harbor Town residents. “People recognize that there is something different here,” Turley says. “ The strip shopping center is based on efficiency. This is based on quality of life. One guy told me he eats fresher food since Miss Cordelia’s opened. Going to a supermarket is such an awful experience that you go once a week and eat fresh for three days and stale the rest of the time. In Harbor Town, you go three times a week and eat fresh all week. Another guy told me that that shopping at Miss Cordelia’s is the best way to meet neighbors.”