Hungry for an urban grocery
10/25/2002

By CHERYL HALL LEVERAGE / The Dallas Morning News

Never has the prospect of a grocery store caused such giddy anticipation.

No, we're not talking about another Central Market. This hullabaloo is about a proposed supermarket in the heart of downtown Dallas.

Plans are moving forward to turn an asphalt parking lot on Main Street into a public parking garage with 140 residences on top and retail space at street level. The crown jewel is going to be a 30,000-square-foot grocery designed for urban dwellers.

Don't expect this to be your typical Albertson's, says Alice Murray, part of the team putting together the mixed-use (and government-subsidized) project. Rather, she envisions a hybrid of Eatzi's with more staples.

And guess what? Several purveyors have shown initial interest.

"Every time I say 'grocery store,' people suddenly don't give a damn that I'm doing lofts," laughs Ms. Murray, who also plans to build 60 luxury apartments in the Gulf States Building next door. "It's the biggest news of all time."

From her viewpoint, this is no hyperbole. To get residents to move into projects downtown, they have to be able to buy food without driving to the suburbs.

Ms. Murray knows this firsthand. She helped redevelop the Kirby Building into loft apartments and now lives there.

Landing a grocery store is just one initiative of Downtown Partnership Inc., a nonprofit organization of property owners formed last year to revitalize the six-block center of downtown.

The problem has always been which comes first: residents or retail.

The partnership wants to forget the question. It's uniting residential, entertainment, parking and public space as one concerted package.

Drugstore interest

Nancy Hormann recently came on board as executive director to spearhead this effort. Two months into her job, she has other news to report.
While she won't name names, two drugstores are vying for ground-level retail space in a new parking garage slated for Commerce Street between Neiman Marcus and the Magnolia Building.

"We're also in negotiations with three bookstores looking at three different locations," says Ms. Hormann, who previously led the redevelopment of historic downtown Sacramento. "We haven't gotten any of the three to pull the trigger yet, but I'm positive that will happen."

She says that Dallas has the same ingredients that turned Sacramento's bowling-alley streets into after-work hives of activity.

Progress on downtown's residential front is remarkable, she notes, with 1,300 housing units built, 258 under construction and 350 more on the drawing board. That's nowhere near the critical mass needed, she says, but it's a long stride in the right direction.

If you haven't been downtown on a weekend night lately, you might be shocked by hordes of pedestrians and traffic jams as urbanites head to restaurants and bars.

"I live on the top of the Kirby," says Ms. Murray, "and when I look down on Main Street, it's total gridlock after 10 o'clock on any given Thursday, Friday or Saturday."

Nightlife in the dead zone? Who'da thunk it?

Well, Ms. Hormann, for one.

"So many downtowns go through revitalization plans, and they look for everybody else to solve their problems," says Ms. Hormann, who also spent four years with the International Downtown Association helping other cities implement such projects. "The only downtowns that work are those where the private sector comes together and gets it done.

"They are so together here; this is going to work."

Nothing but Neiman's

Ms. Hormann remembers her first visit to Dallas as a conventioneer in 1989. She had grown up in Los Angeles and thought of Big D as Neiman Marcus and the world's best shopping.
She was shocked to find nothing but Neiman's downtown.

"We don't have to change perceptions of people outside of Dallas. We just need to give them what they think is here," says Ms. Hormann. "We do have to change the perception of people in the metroplex by giving them a dose of what's happening."

Won't it be ironic if the key to that turnaround turns out to be a grocery store?