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Bridge Street to boost Huntsville’s retail space program

By Donna Mitchell

More than 50 years after the country’s nascent space exploration industry lifted the economic fortunes of Huntsville, Ala., the developers of a planned 2.1 million-square-foot mixed-use project promise to raise the city’s shopping center standards above the traditional regional malls that now dominate the city’s retail offerings.

Bridge Street, as the 100-acre project going up five miles northwest of Huntsville’s downtown is called, will meet the shopping and leisure demands of the city’s well-educated, affluent, multiethnic and fast-growing population when it opens in the fall of 2007, say city officials and the developer.

“We’ve raised the bar in terms of what we are bringing to the market,” said Gary Safady, co-founder and managing member of Los Angeles-based O&S Holdings, the development firm that is working with the city of Huntsville on the $270 million project. The 500,000 square feet of retail will be decidedly upscale, Safady says, though he declined to identify retailers that recently agreed to take space there.

Signed on so far are a Cost Plus World Market, which sells imported decorative household items, furniture and wine; a DSW Shoe Warehouse; a 16-screen Regal cinema; and a Zodo’s Bowling & Beyond.

The retail buildings will sit along the banks of two 10-acre lakes on both sides of the main avenue. Water taxis will shuttle passengers between four office towers, a 200-room Westin hotel topped by 48 luxury condos going for between $400,000 and $1.5 million, and 500 additional residential units, says Safady.

The city is kicking in $1 million to pay for off-site drainage, says Huntsville Mayor Loretta Spencer, but the partnership is not just monetary. The city is building a network of pedestrian trails, which will include a passage that touches Bridge Street’s perimeter and connects to the project’s interior system of winding walkways.

At press time O&S Holdings was undecided about whether to go ahead with a performing arts center at Bridge Street, “because demand for the retail space has grown so much,” Safady said. On averge, between 1990 and 2002, retail sales in the region rose by about 13.2 percent annually, while sales at restaurants grew by about 8.1 percent a year, according to O&S Holdings.

Some 186,000 people live in Huntsville, and about 900,000 live in the metro area. The average household income is $61,000 a year.

Bridge Street is going up next to two major roadways and a sprawling office complex with about 50,000 people arriving daily to work at Boeing, IBM, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and the like. Aside from jobs and increasing affluence, the companies give Huntsville a cosmopolitan population.

Fully 10 percent of residents are foreign-born and speak roughly 100 languages and dialects among them, city officials say. Some 31 percent hold a college degree, well above the U.S. average of 24 percent.

But beyond meeting the city’s hankering for upscale shopping, Bridge Street will help sustain the flow of sales tax revenue, which accounts for about 54 percent of the $177 million city budget for fiscal 2005, says Spencer.

At press time the city was in the midst of hammering out its expected $183 million budget for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1.

That ought to help keep the local economy happily buzzing for quite some time yet to come.