Urban Garden Montessori School has leased space in a building at 610 Main St. as a temporary home for kindergarten through fourth grade classes starting in August.
The one-year lease is for 10,000 square feet on the first floor of the vacant, two-story Kress Building, according to Vera Chenault, head of the school. S.H. Kress and Co. was a leading five-and-dime chain that stopped operations in 1981.
The upstairs and basement “are really in pretty bad shape, and so we are talking with the owners … about getting that space ready for next school year,” Chenault said. Little Rock based Prachi Investment Inc. is the owner.
With that achieved, the school plans to stay on Main Street for the next few years, until it can find a bigger, permanent location somewhere in downtown, Chenault said.
One location she has her eye on is a 1926 warehouse on Garland Street near the Amtrak train station. The warehouse has 45,000 square feet and is owned by Stan Hastings, owner of Moon Distributors, she said.
“Within the next few months, we’re going to make a decision on what property we’re going to move forward on,” she said.
Meantime, the school aims to interact with what has been called a “creative corridor” - including homes nearing completion for Ballet Arkansas, the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra and an expansion of the Arkansas Repertory Theatre presence, not to mention the proposal to establish the Little Rock Technology Park on Main Street.
The creative-corridor label might be stretched a bit to cover Bennett’s Military Supplies, adjacent to the school, and, across the street, R.A.O. Video with bongs for sale and adult videos available for rent and viewing on the premises.
Chenault said it’s “part of being in an urban environment.”
Despite the temporary nature of the plan, she said, “A really important [aspect] is that we want to be downtown,and have our space be a meaningful extension of who we are. And so being accessible to the downtown population and all of the … organizations, the culture and the history … is really important to me.”
A native of Austria, she moved with her family to the United States when she was 10, graduated from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville and has a law degree from W.H. Bowen School of Law at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
Chris Moses, president of the school’s board of directors and president of Moses Tucker Real Estate, one of the leaders in downtown redevelopment, said in a news release that “we’ve been looking for the perfect downtown location for the school, and we could not be more excited about the Kress Building.”
Business, Pages 25 on 04/23/2014