Downtown is hot spot for corporate offices

I like to think of downtown Augusta’s past century as falling into two distinct time periods.

I call the first period PM, which stands for Pre-Mall.* This was a time when downtown was the city’s center of commerce. Whatever you needed, be it car tires, the latest fashions or a ball-peen hammer, you could find it on Broad Street.

The simultaneous arrival of two suburban shopping malls (you know the names) in 1978 capped off the PM period and ushered in the After-Mall, or AM, period. The early years of the AM period were the dark ages. The mass exodus of businesses left little reason for people to head east of 15th Street.

Then the renaissance came.

The first wave was the artists. The quaint and affordable (back then, anyway) storefronts were a perfect place for them to set up shop. A bona fide “art scene” was created and was tagged with the geographic designation Artists Row.

The second wave of the renaissance was led by the proprietors of trendy bars and restaurants, most of which are still in existence. These establishments made downtown “cool” again (albeit in a different way from the PM era) and made Volkswagen-driving young adults want to move into loft-style apartments.

The vibrancy created by the second wave has made many area residents oblivious to the cresting third wave of downtown’s renaissance – the corporate office.

Had trouble finding a place to park during business hours on Broad Street lately? That’s because more professionals are working in the central business district. Take a walk to 1017-1009 Broad St. and you’ll see work on what will be the future headquarters for R.W. Allen & Associates, one of the region’s largest construction companies.

Walk east and you’ll see the newly renovated home office for Toole Engineering at 1005 Broad. Cross 10th Street to the 900 block you’ll see the First Federal Savings building and several other buildings surrounding Lafayette Center undergoing extensive renovations for commercial tenants.

Go a bit fa rther and see the former J.B. White department store at 936 Broad, an 80,000-square-foot condominium project with office and retail space on the ground floor. Cross James Brown Boulevard and you’ll find the headquarters of emergency management software firm Esi Inc., which converted a long-vacant bank building at 823 Broad into, dare I say, the sexiest office space in Augusta.

The SunTrust Bank tower at 801 Broad is nothing new, but its top floor recently became home to Chicago real estate giant Equity Residential’s accounting department, bringing 35 more bodies downtown in addition to the 60 the company already had on Ellis Street. Keep moving and you reach the new SRP Federal Credit Union branch on the ground floor of the new Nicholas Dickinson & Associates architect firm offices at 771 Broad.

Last but not least, follow the sound of heavy equipment to where Sixth Street hits the river and catch a glimpse of the work being done for the monstrous Watermark development, a $100 million project that will have 200 condominiums and apartments, stores, offices and possibly a hotel (the developer says he is in talks with Hilton). Add these new and future developments to downtown’s existing white-collar offices and you have quite a bit of people dining, shopping and potentially wanting to live downtown.

With revitalization around the new judicial center site (controversy notwithstanding), I envision a day when offices and other business ventures occupy the no-man’s land between downtown and the medical district.

Downtown will never return to the PM era, but the AM years are starting to look promising.

WHAT ABOUT REGENCY? Some take joy in the fact that Regency Mall, one of the developments credited with bringing the dark ages to downtown Augusta, is in full decomposition. I do not.**

What I do take joy in, however, is the newest initiative to redevelop the 75-acre site into something other than empty buildings and an asphalt ocean. F.A. Johnson Consulting Group Inc., the firm that engineered the bulk of improvements in the Laney-Walker district, is taking the most serious look at the property since its last major tenant, Montgomery Ward, closed its doors in 2000.

Under approval by the Augusta Commission, the principals at Johnson Consulting have put together a “community leadership group” that includes area business leaders, such as car dealer Jan Hodges Burch and banker Remer Brinson, to create a public-private venture to redevelop the land.

The near-term task will be getting the various owners of Regency Mall*** and its surrounding areas on the same page. That process could become easier now that the half-dozen stakeholders have been reduced by one; last month, New York-based Cardinale Holdings LLC, the owner of the bulk of the mall property, acquired the former Montgomery Ward building from a Charleston, S.C., investment group for $2.3 million.
If you’ve been around long enough, you’ve seen many plans du jour for Regency Mall (government complex, factory outlet stores, sports complex, etc.), so I wish the Johnson boys good luck.

Augusta calling: The Devel­opment Authority of Richmond County last week announced that Augusta’s new T-Mobile call center on Wheeler Road will celebrate it’s “First Call” on Nov. 13. The facility employs about 200 and could employ up to 750 in the coming years. The event is mostly for the officials who helped bring the company to Augusta. A public grand opening is set for early next year.

MAJORING IN THE MINORS: Another event you’ll want to keep an eye out for is a news conference by the Augusta Spartans, which is being extensively overhauled. In the next two weeks, the Spartans’ new ownership group will announce the details of its reorganization plans that The Augusta Chronicle reported on last week.

Aside from a new general manager (John Sisson, the founder of the sports mascot company Thru His Eyes Entertainment), a new league affiliation (the American Indoor Football Association) and a new (fuzzier) mascot, the ownership group will give details on a television deal that promises to bring local sponsors national exposure in Pittsburgh , Baltimore and other cities in the new league.

* A better choice than “Before Mall,” which would make for an awkward acronym.
** Having said that, I do believe a wrecking ball would be the best thing to happen to Regency in the past decade.

*** An interesting side note: Johnson Consulting does not use the term “Regency Mall” when discussing the project because of the negative connotations it carries. Instead, Johnson Consulting refers to the area as “Center City” (based on its geographic location) and “Rocky Creek” (because of the creek that runs alongside the property). Once that wrecking ball levels the property, including the large signs that say “Regency Mall,” other people might start referring to the area as something else, too.