FORT WORTH -- Children splashed around in jetted fountains. A family sought shade under giant umbrellas. Tourists took photos of an iconic mural depicting an Old West cattle drive.
It was a typical afternoon inside Sundance Square Plaza in the center of downtown Fort Worth, a gathering place for all types to go to sit, play, eat, shop, read or expect to find something they'll enjoy, said Johnny Campbell, a native Arkansan and chief executive officer of Sundance Square Management since 2001.
"People want to go where other people are," Campbell told almost 50 visitors from North Little Rock about the 55,000-square-foot plaza that's in the heart of the 35-block Sundance Square entertainment and shopping district. "We wanted it to be kind of a living room for downtown."
North Little Rock Mayor Joe Smith wants that same kind of attraction for his city's downtown Argenta district, though on a much smaller scale. That's why he organized a one-day trip to Texas last week for North Little Rock civic leaders, developers, architects and others to get a firsthand look. About half of the group was city staff members, elected officials and city-appointed commissioners.
North Little Rock's plan is to create a plaza or town square on the city-owned, vacant 0.66 acres on Main Street between Fifth and Sixth streets that is now used for occasional small festivals and other events. North Little Rock bought the site in December 2012. Sundance Square Plaza is the model Smith wants to use for it.
Smith's concept -- referred to as the East Argenta development plan -- includes North Little Rock selling city property behind and adjacent to the plaza for private residential development, along with retail stores and restaurants to complement the plaza. Town houses, single-family homes and 150 "upscale apartments" are among the plans.
For the trip to Texas, most of the people paid their own way or their company paid for them to go, Smith said, an indication to him that there is a lot of interest in creating what he has referred to as a "mini-Sundance Square."
"It's so hard to look at a picture and get a feeling of place," Smith said midweek in reviewing the visit. "And with us having the capability to go to see it, I think that everyone got that feeling of what our square could be.
"We've got a whole lot of momentum now, and we need to keep the ball rolling," the mayor said.
Donna Hardcastle, executive director of the Argenta Downtown Council and Argenta Arts Foundation, said seeing how Sundance Square Plaza attracted people made her "excited about the possibilities" for a scaled-down version in North Little Rock, if it's done right.
"It's got to be cool," Hardcastle said of the Argenta Plaza. "If you can't do it cool, you can't do it."
Smith has said that to get the plaza beyond the idea stage, he first needs to secure development around it. Lawrence Finn, an Argenta resident and managing partner at Dakota Development, and real estate attorney Bob Hardin, whose office is a block from the planned plaza, have plans to develop housing and shops behind the plaza and the Rock Region Metro trolley barn that is just off Main Street and Bishop Lindsey Avenue.
The city's plaza and the residential parts of the mayor's concept can feed off of each other while remaining mutually exclusive, Finn said.
"I think what we're planning will help the plaza and vice versa," said Finn, formerly chief operating officer of The Village at Hendrix in Conway, a "walkable community" with a mix of office, commercial and residential living. "Up at The Village at Hendrix we started with commercial and the residential came after. Or the residential part can lead. Timing wise, I think it can all happen at one time."
There are notable differences in what Fort Worth has created and what North Little Rock aspires to create. For starters, Sundance Square and the Sundance Square Plaza, the latter of which opened in November 2013, were paid for with private money, mainly from Bass Brothers Enterprises. The Bass family's net worth in 2015 was $8.2 billion, according to a Forbes magazine ranking of the 200 richest American families. (Arkansas' Waltons ranked No. 1.)
Downtown Fort Worth is known to have been frequented by famed outlaws Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, hence the name of the square and the plaza.
The Basses' deep pockets allowed Sundance Square Plaza to include all sorts of pretty amenities: The 216 jetted fountains provide decoration and afternoon play for children. The four 40-foot-by-40-foot, custom-made umbrellas glow in changing LED lighted colors at night. A cascading waterfall is located below a 1,500-square-foot, air-conditioned pavilion, which is available for rent at $1,000-$3,000 a pop.
The mural on the side of the former Jett Building (now simply the Mural Building) was painted by Richard Haas in 1985 and depicts a cattle drive from the late 19th century, according to a description at ssqmgmt.com/mural-building. The plaza was constructed on the ground below and in front of it.
Proceeds from the expected sale of the portion of city property behind North Little Rock's plaza area will become a funding source to build the plaza, Smith said, though the sale price hasn't been finalized. The anticipated sale of city-owned riverfront property, an existing city special projects fund, along with possible sponsorship dollars, also could be used to create the kind of activity-filled plaza the mayor envisions, he added.
"If we could get it all done for $3 million, I'd be happy," Smith said.
Sundance Square Plaza is privately owned by Sundance Square, a for-profit management team headed by Campbell, who is originally from Fayetteville. Sundance Square controls everything within the plaza and employs a private security force, he said.
"There won't be things going on inside the area that drive people away," Campbell said, referring to demonstrations and "street preachers," as examples. As a publicly owned plaza, North Little Rock wouldn't have the same control.
Also, despite the private backing and profits from related endeavors within the larger Sundance Square, operation and maintenance of the plaza accounted for a $2 million loss last year, but less than the $2.6 million loss the year before, Campbell told the North Little Rock group.
"You could feel the air go out of the room when he said that," City Alderman Charlie Hight said later.
Smith said operating at such a big loss is "absolutely a concern," but using city resources for in-kind work could offset many expenses for maintenance, repairs and some staffing.
Meeting inside the plaza pavilion after some behind-the-scenes tours, the North Little Rock group tossed around the must-haves to make North Little Rock's concept emulate Sundance Square Plaza.
Smith said he "absolutely" wants a water feature, preferably jetted fountains. When turned off, the water drains quickly, leaving the surface clear for the setup of tables, addition of movie night seating, or for use by host yoga groups, etc.
Shade is another necessity, group members agreed, knowing that North Little Rock won't be able to shell out the $2.5 million that Sundance did for four custom-made, 32-foot-tall umbrellas. There are smaller, "off-the-shelf" umbrellas that could work, Campbell told the group.
"Personally, I like the fountain," Smith said. "I like the flexibility of it. You can turn it off, and 10 minutes later set up tables where the fountains were. Because our space is limited, we almost have to lean in that direction."
While the Sundance fountains are popular with families with young children, they have also been the plaza's biggest headache, said Tracy Tarrant Gilmour, Sundance Square's marketing director. The fountains' intent was to be seen "as art," she told the group. What it quickly became, to planners' surprise, she said, was a splash pad.
When the fountains opened, parents went there with their children -- in bathing suits, pulling wagons filled with towels and toys, carrying along jars of peanut butter and loaves of bread to spend the day there with their children. Afterward, she said, they'd drag soggy children into nearby restaurants' restrooms to change their clothes or even strip down their children inside the pavilion and put them in dry clothes.
"We try things," Gilmour said. "But we're quick to abandon things we don't think work."
So management put up rules for the fountains -- including no bathing suits, no toys or water guns -- and limited the hours to 2-6 p.m. weekdays and 1-6 p.m. on weekends.
The fountains turn off at designated times, then may turn back on an hour later for "date night."
"We took a lot of heat for limiting the fountain hours," Gilmour said. "We just didn't think about that. Being a splash pad was not the intent of this place."
Smith acknowledged that an Argenta fountain could pose the same problem, which would need to be addressed.
"Numerous people [on the trip] said they had concerns about it turning into a splash pad and not be what we intended it to be," Smith said. "I think the ambiance that the fountain puts out is something people are going to go to sit around, eat around, relax around, and there's just something about water that attracts people.
"Our goal is to get families to come down and enjoy it, but also eat at our restaurants, buy things at our retail stores and stay in our hotels," he said.
"That's our responsibility, to make North Little Rock a place that would attract people to stay here, live here and visit here."
Metro on 08/07/2016