It’s not Abercrombie & Fitch, but it’s a start.
Downtown Allentown developer City Center Investment Corp. announced Monday that it has signed business services and printing company Minuteman Press to occupy 2,000 square feet of retail space in its 11-story Two City Center office tower at Seventh and Hamilton streets.
The office services store is unlikely to rival the late Hess’s as a Christmas shopping destination any time soon, but it is the first non-restaurant retail tenant City Center or any other downtown developer has announced for any of the downtown properties being developed or rehabbed along Hamilton Street.
“We always knew retailers, just by their nature, are kind of followers,” said J.B. Reilly, City Center CEO. “They want to see the development in place before they commit.”
The city’s Neighborhood Improvement Zone tax incentive zone has added hundreds of new office workers and several new restaurants to Allentown’s central business district, but so far, other forms of retail, especially national brand name stores, have been slow to follow.
That’s about to change, Reilly promised.
“The interest in our retail is exploding, in that 2015 my expectation is that downtown Allentown will become a retail destination,” he said.
The downtown will never return to its department store heyday, he said, but it will become a place that draws shoppers looking for “authentic shopping experiences.”
“You’re not going to have a department store downtown, nobody is building department stores anywhere anymore,” he said.
City Center, which controls 60,000 square feet of retail space in its various properties both open and under construction, is in final discussions with a number of “unique quality retailers” Reilly said he expects to announce as tenants within the next two to three months.
But retail analysts say areas like downtown Allentown might be a tough sell.
They aren’t only competing against suburban malls for retail tenants, said Simon Thompson, director of commercial solutions for Esri, a Redlands, Calif.-based development research and consulting firm.
They’re competing against more established downtowns such as Alexandria, Va.
Say you’re Nine West, Thompson said. You’ve got limited dollars to expand your footprint, so you’re going to be looking for somewhere that will be lucrative immediately.
“You know there are going to be a lot more women looking for heels and day wear right now in Alexandria,” he said. “You might be able to say in five years time there will just as many here [Allentown], but they aren’t going to make that decision now.”
Few retailers are engaged in the kind of massive expansion programs right now that would make them likely to take a flier on an area like center city Allentown, said Neil Stern, senior partner at McMillan-Doolittle, a retail consulting firm in Chicago.
“They don’t look at intangibles,” he said. “What they try to do is minimize risk. The easiest way is to say there are 10 other retailers who are successful, I’m number 11. They are going to look for proven stories.”
That’s why strip centers and malls still manage to thrive, he said.
With its office workers and arena, Allentown would appeal mostly to restaurants and crossover retailers such as Verizon or AT&T mobile phone stores and impulse-buy sports-related retailers such as Lids or Sunglass Hut, Stern said.
For skittish retailers, Reilly has a ready pitch. Downtown Allentown is building a commercial track record, he said, citing a successful arena opening that has already brought 150,000 feet to Allentown’s streets and offers the promise of new apartments and a soon-to-open Renaissance hotel that will add customers to the streets.
Strata Flats luxury apartments at Four City Center are expected to open next spring bringing an estimated 250-plus residents downtown to provide customers for future retailers. City Center’s seven-story Three City Center is scheduled to open next spring, bringing 500 to 600 additional office workers with disposable income.
Santo Napoli has seen plenty of comings and goings on Hamilton Street.
The retail entrepreneur operates three retails stores within a block of PPL Center, the arena that anchors Allentown’s downtown revival. Napoli’s urban apparel and school uniform stores — New York Urban and Archive — predate the center city revival.
One, Assembly88, seeks to capitalize on it. The men’s apparel story that opened this fall, offers hard-to-find brands such as Patagonia, Red Wing Heritage and Filson, a Seattle-based apparel and luggage company.
“Even when downtown Allentown was not attractive, we had kids coming from Emmaus and Whitehall to buy unique, fun stuff,” Napoli said. “That was our main goal, and it still is because I don’t think downtown is where it needs to be yet with the mix of retail we have.”
He’s optimistic that in the future, it will have a mix of unique retailers that will make it a collective destination. Reilly says that time is coming sooner than you think.
“Next year, next holiday season, people will come to downtown Allentown to shop for Christmas,” he said. “There is no question in my mind.”
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