Artist’s rendering of the Gallery at Fulton

By Nathan Peck | MiBiz
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GRAND RAPIDS — Stepping around tradesmen wending wires through the walls of apartments on the 12th floor of the newest addition to Grand Rapids’ skyline, the Gallery at Fulton, Sam Cummings looks out over a bit of history.

A block away, and more than 100 feet below, sits his first entry into downtown residential living, Tannery Row. Looking down at the building he renovated in 1996, Cummings said he and his partners at CWD Real Estate Investment navigated rough financial seas to make the $34 million development a reality.

The city of Grand Rapids chose Cummings’ proposal for redevelopment of the former parking garage on the site in 2005. The lot lay bare while Cummings worked to secure an agreement with the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts and broke ground in 2009 as the economic crisis gripped the financial markets.

“We got in right before things melted down,” Cummings told MiBiz. The project came through because CWD is “delivering a build-to-suit project: a new home for the UICA, a 250 car parking deck to the city of Grand Rapids and 54 urban apartments.”

The building will be home to the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts — after it makes the move late in 2010 — and 54 apartments in a tower dubbed The Gallery, which will be LEED-accredited. The project is unique for the blend of gallery space and residential.

The UICA’s 40,000-square-foot facility includes 8,500 square feet of gallery space, two theatres, a youth studio, a 2,000-square-foot ceramics studio, lounges, two reading areas, and an artist-in-residence studio. The green roof of the facility will be utilized as a 4,000-square-foot outdoor sculpture terrace.

The location at Division and Fulton ties into redevelopment and the artist community that has grown along Division, known as the Avenue of the Arts.

“This connects the central business district with Heartside — it is really appropriate that the UICA will be there. We have the (Grand Rapids Art Museum) blocks away with its scholarly activities and the Avenue of the Arts with the raw creative spirit on the other side,” Cummings said. “At the middle is the UICA; not an art museum, there’s no permanent collection, but at the grassroots of the art world.”

The Gallery apartments feature studio, one-, two- and three-bedroom models. Downtown apartments are a subset of the real estate market that still sees room for growth, where a recent survey of high-end downtown apartments found that they were 99 percent occupied, said Cummings. Cummings said 10 of the apartments are already preleased and he expects to be near full occupancy when Triangle Associates Inc. completes construction and the building opens in September. While the downtown real estate market has struggled to absorb the stock that resulted from a flurry of condo construction in the early 2000s that sent prices tumbling some 30 percent, apartments have remained strong.

“The downtown submarket is doing extremely well right now — it is an underserved market still,” Cummings said. “For apartments, people are looking for the lifestyle. The city, philanthropy and businesses have worked very hard to make downtown Grand Rapids a place where people want to live.”

The challenges in construction were centered in keeping four very different uses from impacting the others, said Craig Datema, president and CEO of Triangle. The building uses poured concrete in UICA’s facility to accommodate the varying gallery and studio spaces, but employs precast concrete in the parking deck to rein in costs. The architects took care to use interstitial space for additional sound deadening below the first floor of apartments, which sit on the sixth floor, above the UICA’s theater.

“Any time you’re working on a mixed-use project, it is interesting how you balance the needs of all those users,” Datema told MiBiz. “It is a condominium: the city owns their own parking, the UICA will own their facility, (CWD) has their apartments and retail on Division.”

Cummings has made redevelopment of downtown properties a hallmark of his business strategy, and manages more than 2 million square feet in West Michigan. Grand Rapids has been effective in engaging philanthropy, public and private interests in redevelopment projects, but to keep downtown vibrant, the city must work to stand on its own and bring some of the area’s corporate headquarters downtown.

“We really need to take a holistic approach to what’s next. Just like in a business, or life, you cannot just finish a project and say, ‘We’ve arrived.’ We have to look at ways to remain innovative,” Cummings said. “The city has been the beneficiary of a tremendous amount of philanthropy that has transformed downtown. We need to find a way to transition, utilize that tremendous largesse, create economic sustainability for downtown and attract some real job creation and employers downtown.”