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Photo by Solomon Crenshaw Jr.
Renderings of The Edge development planned for Green Springs Highway in Homewood.
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Images courtesy of JJ Thomas.
Renderings of The Edge development planned for Green Springs Highway in Homewood.
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Images courtesy of JJ Thomas.
A site map of The Edge development planned for Green Springs Highway in Homewood.
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Photo by Solomon Crenshaw Jr.
The Edge developers JJ and Whitney Thomas.
Alex Wyatt took a trip down memory lane recently, as he flipped through a stack of photos showing the Homewood of his youth.
The pictures showed the Patriot Park area that was a par-3 golf course where he played as a child. There was a snapshot of downtown that featured a Huffstutler’s lumberyard where City Hall is today.
And, of course, 18th Street South featured the famous curve that was a longtime landmark.
“It’s funny,” the City Council president said, “because now when I’m there, I don’t think of it being all that different. It’s better, but not a whole lot different.
“Those photographs, you look at them and you just forget how much it’s changed,” he said, adding Green Springs Highway to the list of transformed areas in the city.
“If the little kid me were to show up, he would probably say, ‘This feels the same. It’s just better,’” Wyatt said. “It looks better. There are more things that I like here, but I still feel like I’m in a small town and a community that prides itself on being a great community for its residents and its businesses.”
There is a cliché expression when something unwelcome comes to a city or community: There goes the neighborhood. In Homewood, the general sentiment seems to be: There grows the neighborhood.
From the former Econo Lodge hotel to the Weygand Surveyor building and The Edge, Homewood appears to be gaining new commercial development at every turn.
Jennifer Andress, who chairs the city council’s planning & development committee, said a boom seems to have arrived when it comes to commercial development in Homewood.
“It certainly feels that way,” she said. “Honestly, everything is going very smoothly. We’ve got stuff happening all over the city, which is fabulous. From west to east and downtown all the way out to West Homewood.
“That’s really what I think this council has done. … Do the infrastructure improvements as far as sidewalks and beautification efforts to make it to where people want to invest,” Andress said. “If you take a property like the Valley Hotel [on 18th Street], what happened there is exactly what should happen as far as falling dominoes. Once that gets in place, that beautifies that corner.”
What had long been an empty parking lot has become the boutonniere on the lapel of a proud downtown, where a number of retail outlets have blossomed.
Mike Mouron was the developer and one of the owners of the Valley Hotel project. He said credit goes to the Homewood mayor and city council for recognizing that a first-class hotel on that location had a good opportunity of being a catalyst for new development in the area.
Mouron, who lives in Mountain Brook, received incentives to build not only the hotel but also 15,000 square feet of retail, which includes Edgar’s Bakery, Rodney Scott’s BBQ and Little Donkey locations.
“I’m very attracted to the vitality of Homewood, especially right in the downtown area,” he said. “It’s a very vibrant and fun spot to work, a fun spot to shop and everything else. I’m a big fan of Homewood.”
Mouron is also developing the former Valley Mall, which has three buildings under construction. The one that’s just coming out of the ground will be SouthPoint Bank, which the bank is building after Mouron sold them the land.
Next door to the bank will be Luca restaurant, which will be Nick Pihakis-inspired Italian-themed restaurant. The building closest to the Valley Hotel, nearest 18th Street, will be the new location for Hero Doughnuts, which is moving from the intersection of Central and Oxmoor avenues to the location where the Valley Mall used to be, behind The Dance Foundation.
Mouron said he made a conscious effort to create developments that align with Homewood. He initially considered putting a pair of national retail chains — perhaps Chipotle or Panera Bread — in his downtown space. That appealed to him, he said, because Homewood generally doesn’t attract those types of business due to a lack of dedicated parking.
“That was my original thought, but the more I thought about it, I realized that would be a radical change from what Homewood was,” he said. “I did not want to be the first developer to break that mold, if you will. I got away from focusing on national chains and went back to focusing on a boutique hotel and three local restaurants.
“Homewood has so many mom-and-pop stores where the owner is actually behind the counter, which really makes it very unique,” Mouron said. “Not only that, but it has such a wide variety of different retail venues. I hear a lot from the guests at the Valley Hotel, how they like to walk around Homewood and go into all the little shops. It’s just a charming place.”
National chains would have diluted that charm, he said, and certainly not added to it.
“The retail that’s emerged, almost all the way to Highway 31, it’s just really been so fun to watch happen,” Andress said. “And it’s happening in West Homewood too, and it’s happening in Green Springs.”
Another much-discussed development would involve the Piggly Wiggly grocery story at U.S. 31 and Oxmoor Road. The grocer has long been a staple of the Homewood landscape.
The first two items on the July 11 agenda of the Homewood Planning Commission involved a proposed redevelopment for that area, but they were postponed until Aug. 1.
“The Pig has always been such an integral part of the community,” Wyatt said. “It gives money to all the schools. It helps people out. It’s a very neighborhood grocery store that everyone goes to. It’s just got a wonderful community feel to it and it’s a very important business to Homewood.
“At one of the meetings on [development] incentives, they said it this way,” the council president said. “‘We want to give Homewood the Piggly Wiggly that it deserves because this is an important store to us.’ They want to provide a better building and a better experience than what they’re currently doing; and quite frankly, what they’re currently doing, everybody loves.”
JJ Thomas and wife Whitney attended the Homewood Planning Commission meeting on July 11 for their own new venture, taking the next step toward The Edge, the planned family-friendly gathering spot along Green Springs Highway. Plans for The Edge include multiple retail outlets and restaurant options, an outdoor greenspace and activity options for all ages.
“The past couple of decades, there have been two retail tenants,” JJ Thomas said of the space, which was most recently Gold Seafood. “Those tenants moved out in February, of this year so the buildings are empty now.”
To date, the Thomases have only done residential development, but their first commercial construction project, a new Slice Pizza in downtown Edgewood, is underway.
The couple lives in Edgewood and wants to enhance the city they call home.
“Being a mom, it was just important to bring something that was going to be able to be enjoyed by our community,” Whitney Thomas said. “There are so many families, so many students at Samford, UAB. We wanted to bring something to the community that worked for a lot of different folks.
“Whether you get off work and you want to have a happy hour beverage, or it’s a weekend and you want to bring the family for a picnic and you want to sit down and enjoy some time together,” she said. “We wanted to provide that for people.”
JJ Thomas said it is a tricky balance to have commercial developments that don’t alter the character of a community.
“If you look at Homewood and recent commercial developments, they’re all local Homewood people who are developing,” he said. “I think because we’re Homewood residents, we want to see what’s best for Homewood and that’s not what’s always the most profitable and what’s the biggest development. I think that’s what differentiates Homewood from some other communities and why it’s keeping the homey feel and still having new developments.”
Rendering courtesy of Under Vulcan LLC.
A rendering of the Weygand Surveyor building at 169 Oxmoor Road in West Homewood.
In West Homewood, Brian Krogsgard is developing the former Weygand Surveyor property. He and his family have lived in Edgewood since 2011, though they also lived in West Homewood while their home was being rebuilt.
“I’ve always loved Homewood and fell in love with West Homewood over the past few years,” he said. “When I had the opportunity to acquire property in West Homewood, I jumped at it.”
Krogsgard’s plan for the former surveyor office is to redevelop the existing two-story office building into a mixed-use development. It will feature a combination of retail and restaurant spaces on the ground floor and office space on the second floor.
The proposal also included parking, landscaping and other site improvements, including a resurveying of 169 Oxmoor Road and adjacent 173 Oxmoor Road. That will allow for the parking and flow of traffic to work appropriately to wrap around the building.
Krogsgard said it would be easy for a city to “get stuck on” avoiding change.
“If you say, ‘Hey, you can’t change what it is, you can’t develop because you’ll mess it all up — I think if you do that, you’re liable to prevent good change as much as bad change,” he said.
Tom Walker, president of Village Creek Development, is another Homewood resident with an active development project in the city. He’s converting the former Econo Lodge hotel on Oxmoor Road into 10,000 square feet of retail space as well as lofts and townhomes.
Eighteen rental lofts would be built above the commercial space, with 51 townhomes behind them.
“So much of what real estate is, is not only adding value creatively to the city and the tax base, but improving the neighborhood and the communities [in which] we build projects,” Walker said. “West Homewood is a great neighborhood. It has an amazing school. It has an amazing park. The neighbors are very proud of it, as they should be.
“We saw this as an opportunity to take something that was probably not adding value to the neighborhood in the form of the existing hotel,” he said, “and add new restaurants and new residents to the neighborhood. They could not only take advantage of what we were bringing from a food and beverage perspective in our project, but also to the other food and beverage users and retailers in the area that have obviously been there and thrived for a while.”
While the Econo Lodge and Weygand projects are separate, Krogsgard said the two should mesh well, since Walker’s project will add about 150 people to the walkable neighborhood.
“That’s 150 people that weren’t there before, who will be tempted every single day to go eat in the amazing restaurant that’s going to be in this building that I’m developing,” Krogsgard said. “I like that a lot. Our development makes their development more successful, their development makes our development more successful. That’s always good, especially when you’re taking underutilization and giving it better utilization. That hotel needed to go.
“Now, when those two developments both exist, it’ll change the landscape of West Homewood, I think for the better,” he said. “That’s a change and I think is a pretty good change.”
Wyatt said the city’s hope, particularly in Edgewood and West Homewood, is to have commercial areas that feel appropriate for the residential area around them, rather than conflicting.
“You want there to be a cohesive flow between residential and commercial,” he said. “You don’t want them to compete with each other. In Edgewood, the land that new people have bought and new businesses have come in, for the most part, have used the existing structures of what’s there. They’re putting in businesses that complement what was there and the residential area around it.”
Primarily, commercial additions have come in the form of new restaurants, which have proven to be very popular.
West Homewood is similar, the council president said, with a lot of new restaurants coming in. In downtown, “we certainly try to – within the existing zoning laws – have developments that don’t overpower the residential and don’t compete with the residential,” he said.
“It’s great to have all these things, but we have to have them in a way that preserves the character and makes it feel like everybody’s hometown,” Wyatt said. “That’s what’s important: that everyone feels like they’re living in a place that’s secure, where their kids can go to a great school system, where they’ve got businesses that they want to support and can get the things that they need, [and] that it’s walkable. All those things roll into what makes Homewood so special. It is important that, whatever happens, that we keep that identity as a central part of it.”
Editor's note: This story was updated on Aug. 1 with a correction that Brian Krogsgard and his family have lived in Edgewood since 2011.
