A new building is taking shape in downtown Hot Springs, something its owner, Ken Wheatley, hopes will serve as a catalyst in continuing the area's growth.
Wheatley, who manages about 17 downtown properties with around 35 tenants, is constructing a new building with three retail spaces on the lower level and a 6,000-square-foot residential space on the upper level in the 500 block of Central Avenue, directly across from Bathhouse Row.
The lower level is near completion, he said, and his home should be complete by January.
"Hot Springs is healthy," he said while overlooking Central Avenue from the upstairs patio. "It's not robust. It's not booming, but it is very healthy. ... We've had a lot of building going on. We've added a lot of restaurants, a lot of bars, a lot of taverns, a lot of food service, but it's been over 100 years since something was built across from the national park."
The new building is located on a former parking lot adjacent to the Gangster Museum of America. The lower level has three retail spaces that were leased within two weeks of announcing the project. Wheatley said by selling his current home and moving downtown, he will be better able to communicate with his various tenants and manage those properties.
"Mackenzie Simon, 21-year-old girl out of Lake Hamilton, is just quite an entrepreneur," he said. "She's going to bring her Fat Bottomed Girls down here. She's keeping that space for something else. She's going to add a shop -- Mackenzie's Extraordinary Gift Shop -- and that's going to be something she's doing new. And then Pour Some Sugar on Me, she's going to bring (the store) here and her mother's going to take that space. She's got something planned for it. So it will be three new retail shops downtown."
Wheatley said at first he received some pushback from the community about the structure and how it would fit into the historic cityscape. But, as it has started taking shape, he said he believes people are seeing just how it fits in downtown.
"We got a lot of flack initially from people who saw the design and said 'No, that's not historic' and our Historic Commission has a clause in there that says you may not build a 100-year-old building," he said.
"They don't want it to look like that. They want some elements, though, that match the architecture, so we put marble tile on the outside. We have lots of arches across the top and across the side.
"A lot of interest has come as a result of us doing this. This is our primary residence now; this is our home. There are a lot of people that have talked about doing the same thing, either with condos or there's a couple of people who have their residence in their buildings down here. So there's many, many more people that would like to do this."
Wheatley said building downtown has some additional requirements and challenges "because of the nature of the fire district that it's in," but said the city of Hot Springs has been very helpful in accomplishing the project.
"There are a lot of rules and a lot of regulations meant to protect the property owners and the property downtown and it hasn't been without travail, but they've worked very well with me and have found solutions for every problem that we've come up against," he said.
On a larger scale, building a downtown that is thriving will take accomplishing a few things, Wheatley said.
"We need to do a couple more things to take it from healthy to robust and there's a couple things we've been told by the last two people that came to town that we hired as consultants," he said.
"One is we've been told we need to take at least one lane, maybe two lanes, of Central Avenue and make it look like a downtown European place with umbrellas and tables and chairs, restaurants and bike paths.
"Slow the traffic down. You do that all over Europe and many places you can't drive through at all, or you slow down and go calmly. That would really enhance tourism here and cause more locals to be active in the downtown area."
The second, he said, is to utilize the Majestic Hotel site in a new way which showcases the thermal waters.
"We've been told twice by our consultants -- and the residents are all in favor of it -- and that is making some kind of outdoor thermal pool project where the Majestic was," he said. "It is the name of our city, the history. Our theme for 55, 60-70 years was 'We bathe the world,'" Wheatley said.
"The number one question that's asked to people all over this community by people who come to visit is 'Where can we go get in the waters?' If you ask any hotel, any tourism hot spot here, ask them what people ask for and they're going to say 'Where can I go get in the baths?' I have no doubt that it would increase our tourism 50 percent downtown and that's a pretty big boost, you don't have to advertise it -- you just have to tell them about it."
Vibrant downtowns are a sign of two things, he said -- employment and residents. Wheatley said downtown Hot Springs has numerous residents, but little employment.
Wheatley said Hot Springs and the surrounding area lakes, national park and trails attract high-paid employees from bigger companies, and downtown building owners could invest in their properties to provide residential and business spaces for these companies.
His suggested utilizing a building such as the former St. Joseph's Hospital for commercial office space because the trend in larger cities is creating workspaces in vacant warehouses and historic buildings to attract businesses similar to Google, Oracle and Microsoft. Then, he said, buildings such as the Medical Arts Building could be converted to condominium spaces for those employees.
"That would add the element that would say OK, you don't have to ask the guy that owns the Medical Arts Building would he like to improve that," he said. "If that happened, he would improve it tomorrow so you don't have to worry about some of the other buildings they're thinking about condo projects in it. They would do it tomorrow and the money would be there. So those three things are really vital to us becoming the destination that everybody thinks we ought to be."
Wheatley said Hot Springs continues to see small growth, which has added up, but it will take all of these additional improvements to create a large-scale revitalization.
"This is what I would call small growth. It's unique and different, but it's still small," he said. "The only way we're going to have exponential growth is to do what we talked about as far as rearranging the street, the thermal pools ... that's going to be explosive. This is good, but the cumulative of all these little things together has made a big difference.
"I get to sit and talk and listen to people down the street and listen to my tenants, talk about it, and our guests notice the differences. They're seeing the changes, they're excited about it so it's happening, but we can do better."
Local on 09/09/2018