“I jokingly tell people it takes a staff of 3 over four weeks to plant and pull up the bulbs and it only takes 15 minutes to give them all away.”
— An e-mail from the Garvey Center’s Larry Weber on the center’s “Great Annual Tulip Give Away” of more than 15,000 tulip bulbs to tenants
WICHITA — A salon is opening in the former Bob’s Place barber shop at the Garvey Center downtown.
Jennifer Collins and Shelby Cheatum are moving their Shear Voltage salon from a small suite at the Collective near 21st and Greenwich to the Garvey Center on July 1.
“We’re just really excited to be in the downtown area and continue to grow our business,” Collins says.
She and Cheatum have been cutting hair together for about seven years and opened their business almost two years ago. They purposely started small because they heard the first couple of years in any business are particularly rough, Collins says. She says they’ve been successful, though, and are ready to grow.
The new space is 1,512 square feet.
Adam Clements and Larry Weber of Builders Inc. handled the deal.
The expanded salon will have eight stylists and offer a range of services in addition to hair care. That includes spray tans, massage, body waxing, makeup, eyelash extensions and, eventually, manicures and pedicures.
Collins says it makes sense to move downtown now.
“I think we’re hitting it at the time that we can grow with the downtown area.”
“Boy, he’d be a hard individual to replace from his personality and … as a shoe shine because that’s such a dying art.”
– The Garvey Center’s Larry Weber on Richard Henry, who shined shoes in the building for more than a decade until his death last week
WICHITA — Bob Martin has left McDonald, Tinker, Skaer, Quinn & Herrington to start his own law firm, but he hasn’t gone far.
His Law Office of Robert G. Martin officially opens Wednesday in almost 2,000 square feet on the fourth floor of the R.H. Garvey Building at 300 W. Douglas.
That’s one floor below McDonald, Tinker.
“It’s a chance for me to do more of my niche,” Martin says.
He’s been at McDonald, Tinker, where he’s been a director and shareholder, since 1987.
“I’m top of the letterhead, actually.”
He says the firm primarily focuses on litigation, and that’s not his specialty.
“I’ll never do criminal law in my life again,” Martin says. “The practice of law has become specialized.”
Martin will focus on estate planning and workers compensation defense work.
“Those are the only two areas I will be emphasizing going forward.”
Why?
“Because I enjoy ’em. I’m good at it.”
He says estate planning can be more pleasant than other types of legal work.
“We call this area of the law ‘happy law,’” Martin says. “You’re making people have a better outcome for their lives and their families and their possessions. You’re proactively preventing problems.”
In the workers comp arena, he says, “I’m trying to make the best of a difficult situation.”
Martin says by starting his own firm, he’ll have more resources.
Wayne Bell, district director of the Small Business Administration.
WICHITA — The government is better known for red tape than streamlined processes, but the General Services Administration is working on that, and a change in offices for the Small Business Administration is going to offer something of a test case.
The SBA’s Wichita district office is moving from 271 W. Third St., where the IRS is, to the Page Court Building at the Garvey Center at 220 E. Douglas.
Before the move can happen, there has to be a design phase, which could determine everything from the tint of the windows to security systems in the new office.
“Normally, the process would take … 60 days or more,” says Wayne Bell, the SBA’s district director.
The GSA has a new design intent drawing process that will convene everyone involved in the move — contractors, designers, the SBA, the GSA, a representative for the landlord and anyone else connected with the project.
“You’re going to have all of the players in the room,” Bell says. “With this approach, everything should be complete within a three-day timeframe. It’s a really, really good idea.”
The old way of doing things involved sending drawings to the GSA, then the SBA, which would make changes before sending it back to the GSA. Then the contractor would get the drawings after a protracted period.
“So it could take months,” Bell says.
The design intent drawing creates a condensed timeframe where there’s an on-the-spot rough draft of the SBA’s needs that gets refined immediately with everyone present.
“This is very new,” Bell says. “So it’s going to be kind of an on-the-job learning process.”
The meetings will take place over a three-day period in late October at the Wichita Downtown Development Corp.’s design innovation center.
“What we try to do in that space is make resources available,” says WDDC president Jeff Fluhr.
That includes conference calling and video conferencing.
“We’re thrilled they’re willing to take the opportunity,” Fluhr says of the SBA and GSA. He says the attitude is “let’s walk through it and see what we learn from it.”
WICHITA — In another sign of recovery – both for Wichita and downtown in particular – the Garvey Center is going to build new apartments.
“We’re going to be constructing 36 new apartment units at the corner of First and Waco,” says Garvey Center manager Larry Weber.
The city owns half the parking lot that’s at the southeast corner, and the Garvey Center owns the other half.
Weber expects the project will take about a year to build after the city approves selling its land.
“The thing that’s significant about it is it’s adding new residential into our downtown,” says Jeff Fluhr, president of the Wichita Downtown Development Corp.
Fluhr says Builders Inc., which owns the Garvey Center, and its CEO, Mike Garvey, were some of the first to step up to help pay for a $100,000 study of downtown that showed that more residential is needed. Fluhr says more living areas in turn help meet retail and restaurant needs, which also were part of the plan.
City Council member Janet Miller agrees that the new apartments are likely to help with the ripple effect.
“That brings more services, more retail, more entertainment options.” All of that may eventually lead to a full-scale grocery store for the city’s core, she says, “which is what everybody wants.”
The Garvey Center already has 155 apartments at 250 Douglas Place.
“We’re 100 percent (occupied) on those, and the demand is such that more are needed,” Weber says.
Parking will be within the Garvey Center’s garage.
While other apartments and condos have become available downtown in recent years, none has been built from the ground up.
WICHITA — In the four years since Christopher Clark purchased a 3,000-square-foot Delano building for his Christopher Clark Designer Portraits, the economy has crashed and the photography business has changed.
Clark says when he opened at 1113 W. Douglas, he wanted room to meet with customers because “we just wanted the one-on-one personal relationship.”
Now, he says, “More people are going to the Internet to actually purchase pictures.”
So after two years of trying to sell his building, Clark auctioned it last week and is moving to the Garvey Center next month.
Larry Weber of Builders Inc. handled the deal.
Clark will be subleasing about 1,700 square feet from the South Central Kansas Economic Development District, which no longer needed all the room it has.
The space happens to be where Channel 33, the former WB affiliate, used to be, so Clark says its high ceilings and other features are ideal for him.
“I’ll still be able to do a gallery and a studio,” he says.
Clark, who has been shooting in Wichita for 25 years, will remain in his Delano space until he moves July 16.
“I look forward to the future,” he says. “This is going to be fun.”
WICHITA — Reluctantly, Chapter 13 bankruptcy trustee Laurie Williams has to move her office.
“When I moved here, I really had hoped to not have to move again,” she says of her 2,300 square feet at 225 N. Market.
“I love this space and its proximity to my courthouse, but my caseload has grown, and I’m just out of room.”
Williams is moving her office to 5,800 square feet at the R.H. Garvey Building at 300 W. Douglas.
The new office will allow for more files and employees.
Williams, who makes recommendations on whether Chapiter 13 plans should be approved and then administers them, has almost 2,900 cases.
Currently, she has 12 employees.
“I hope to add two more,” she says.
Larry Weber represented the Garvey Center in the deal, and Patrick Ahern of Grubb & Ellis/Martens Commercial Group represented Williams.
The new office will be ready in late summer.
WICHITA — Dream Catchers Case Management has signed a new lease with the Garvey Center.
“We provide case management services for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities,” says president Kathleen Blackburn.
Dream Catchers has been in Broadway Plaza but is moving for more space. Its new office will be about 800 square feet.
Blackburn says the Garvey Center made sense for several reasons, including parking, being centrally located and having a health club.
Larry Weber of Builders Inc. handled the deal for the Garvey Center, and Tony Utter of Utter Commercial Real Estate represented Dream Catchers.
WICHITA — It’s getting to the point you can’t call Robert Eyster and Michael Ramsey nascent developers any longer.
Eyster has purchased the former Protection One building at the northwest corner of First and Market, which makes the sixth downtown property he’s bought to redevelop in less than a year.
“In the process of looking for buildings that have kind of been neglected or buildings that are too big or too small for people . . . we’ve looked at probably all the buildings downtown,” Ramsey said.
That’s how they found the 7-story, 171,000-square-foot Protection One building, which the former Kansas Gas and Electric Co. built in 1953.
“That building has got some very dynamic bones to it,” Ramsey said. “It just spoke to us.”
He and Eyster are renaming the building the Lux and creating luxury apartments and possible condos along with commercial on the first two floors.
“It sounds like a really exciting development,” said Patrick Ahern of Grubb & Ellis/Martens Commercial Group, who was one of the agents who handled the deal.
Ahern, who specializes in downtown properties, said, “More people living downtown will attract more retail and give more vibrance to downtown and that area in particular.”
He said the sale of that much Class B downtown property “potentially helps the market because it’s less space for other buildings to compete with.”
Ahern and Steve Martens represented Protection One, and Marty Gilchrist and Grant Tidemann of J.P. Weigand & Sons represented Eyster.
Eyster has already purchased and is redeveloping the former Zelman building, the Board of Trade building, Victoria Park Apartments, the two-story building at 100 S. Market and Kelly Donham’s former property on Douglas between Main and Market.
With the help of Kansas City, Mo., architect El Dorado Inc., which designed the Finn Lofts on Commerce Street, Eyster and Ramsey hope to use a lot of the 1950s architectural elements already in the mid-century modern building. That includes light fixtures, door knobs and railings.
“They have actually cataloged everything they could in the KGE building in the hopes we . . . could repurpose those elements,” Ramsey said.
Farha Construction is the contractor and Builders Inc. is managing the building.
“This is really going to be a unique facility,” said Larry Weber of Builders Inc.