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THEIR TOWN

Residents in Hudson, Ohio, had final say in downtown project

BY DEBRA HAZEL

Just because the 200-year-old downtown in Hudson was run down doesn’t mean a lot of people didn’t care about it. On the contrary, residents and officials in this Ohio city 30 miles southwest of Cleveland were very particular about the way it was to be fixed up.

Hudson, incorporated as a village in 1837, expanded over time and became a city in 1991. It still has a lot of its old charm, including a number of historic homes dating from the late 1800s on the edge of a traditional downtown.

But the downtown was showing its age in a less desirable way. Though a post office, a drugstore and other mostly service stores remained, residents were going to more modern places for their shopping, either to suburban big-box retailers nearby or to malls and lifestyle centers in Cleveland. Given that household income among the city’s 22,000 residents averages about $130,000 a year, that was adding up to a lot of lost sales tax revenue.

“Over time Hudson’s downtown, like many small-town downtowns, had declined,” said Randy Ruttenberg, a principal of Cleveland-based Fairmount Properties, co-developer of First and Main, as the mixed-use project designed to reverse the town’s fortunes and set to open this month is called. “It’s no different from a lot of small towns.”

Without strong apparel retailers, “the traffic was not there,” added Jody L. Roberts, communications manager for the city of Hudson.

Resolving to reverse the decline, in 1995 the city bought and demolished an old Morse Controls factory directly behind the Main Street retail district, opening up a 14-acre field. In 2001 it chose Fairmount to redevelop the site. At that point Tom Murdough, a 31-year Hudson resident eager to see the town center improved, formed the Hudson Village Development Co. to oversee the redevelopment. Together the city and Hudson Village Development hired Fairmount.

But the people of Hudson weren’t about to leave all the decisions to a private developer, or even to city officials. This was to be a truly private-public partnership. The city held community meetings for the next two years to find out what people wanted and how best to deliver it. Fairmount had no problem with that.

“Just springing [a project] on a community is a wrongheaded or old-fashioned way to approach real estate,” said Adam Fishman, another Fairmount principal. “It makes more sense to look at the hopes, dreams and aspirations of a community.”

Through the meetings, Fairmount executives and city officials learned that people wanted a pedestrian-friendly shopping place that would blend with the existing retailers, Roberts recalls. That resulted in some strict design restrictions. To avoid overwhelming the historic downtown, no building was to be more than three stories high, nor was the project to be visible from Main Street. With the exception of the supermarket, none of the buildings exceeds 5,000 square feet.

Further, the planners learned that residents were unwilling to walk more than about 10 minutes at a time, so the project’s layout ensures that no walk will be more than eight or nine minutes long.

Even after all this, the developers were still not off the hook. The city held a referendum, with 60 percent of the voters approving the plans. The result: a 200,000-square-foot open-air complex with 120,000 square feet of retail space and 40,000 square feet of offices above that, a 25-room country inn, 12 upscale townhouses and 18 loft condominiums.

More to the point, the development gives residents plenty of scope for local shopping. The demographics were strong enough for Heinen’s Gourmet Market, a Cleveland-based supermarket chain, to open there. But the city restricted Heinen’s to 20,000 square feet, as opposed to its more typical 50,000-square-foot units, to keep the store within the scale of the neighborhood. Some selections, particularly in packaged goods, will be reduced, with fresh goods forming a larger part of the mix than usual.

“We think the perishables selection will be as good as or better than our previous stores,” said Jeff Heinen, who runs the family-owned chain with his brother, Tom. “We believe the Hudson store has a good chance to succeed, given the demographics of that town.”

The other tenants signed on so far are a mix of national, regional and local retailers, including Ann Taylor Loft, Caribou Coffee, Chico’s and local eatery D’Agnese’s Tomato Grill.

“We’re very proud of attracting local and regional tenants,” Ruttenberg said, noting that the agreement with the city included a proviso that First and Main not dedicate more than 50 percent of its space to nationals. “And we’re under that.”

Rents per square foot are in the mid-$20s. Among the other locals are Aladdin’s Eatery, a Mediterranean restaurant; Fundamentals Creative Toy Store, which is relocating to the center; and Miss Molly’s Tea Room, a Victorian tearoom and specialty gift store whose First and Main unit is its second.

The city is also building a 50,000-square-foot library in conjunction with the project. The building, located across the street from most of the retail buildings, will open in the spring.

The developers paid close attention to the architecture, too. The buildings are situated on three European-style main streets that surround a one-acre village green, not unlike other small parks in downtown Hudson. In harmony with the downtown, the First and Main buildings feature spare lines and brick throughout, a style quite different from the wood-oriented Shaker and Prairie styles more typical of the Midwest and similar to what is seen in New England.

“It looks like Connecticut, not like Ohio,” said Hudson Village Development’s Murdough.

Murdough says his goal was to make sure the First and Main primarily benefits the community, not Hudson Village Development. “We’re not looking to make a big dollar.” (In addition to his role as founder of Hudson Village Development, Murdough is also CEO of locally based Step2, a company that designs molded-plastic consumer products.)

The design defies a tendency in lifestyle center design to go “over the top” in the use of classic small-town architecture, to the point that it looks artificial, says Kevin Zak, who designed the project in his previous post with Dorsky Hodgson + Partners, Cleveland. (He is now design director of First Interstate Properties, a Lyndhurst, Ohio-based development firm.)

The project uses seven kinds of local brick, some dating from 1937, all of it matching what is used in other buildings across town. (Finding these was difficult; in the end, Zak and Murdough found some 70,000 salvaged bricks in the nearby city of Fairport Harbor. “That was luck,” Zak said.)

The project’s 710 parking spaces will be located on the street and in a deck. The ground-breaking took place in June 2003, and the opening can’t come too soon for the community.

Beyond the project planning, the city is also a financial partner. It is spending about $25 million on roads, sewers and the burying of electrical lines as well as other infrastructure work, all of which amounts to half the project’s total cost of $50 million. The contribution is funded through 30-year loans and should generate a return of about $29.5 million over 20 years in sales taxes. “And that’s a low estimate,” Roberts said.

The developers, too, are happy with the fruits of this public-private relationship.

As Murdough puts it, “It’s been a model case.”

And when it opens this month, the residents will be delivering their verdict on a project they have watched very closely.