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BuildingBoomtime in Fondren

Special to Northeast Ledger / Susan Marquez

Jackson, MS April 2, 2008 - Take a drive through the Fondren area and you'll see the landscape changing almost daily.

Fondren Place, a new development by Mattiace/Peters Development Company, is progressing "better than we imagined it," according to Sam Peters, vice president of sales and leasing. "We are especially pleased with the way the old Duling School building is progressing."

The school is just one phase of the project, and will be transformed into a small mall filled with a variety of retail tenants. Peters said the old school was built in 1929, and the plan is to retain as much of the original integrity of the building as possible.

"The classrooms will be used as store spaces and the main hall will remain," Peters said. "The old chair railings and even the coat closets and cubby holes will remain."

While tight-lipped on prospective tenants, Peters said the response "has been incredible" and that if the deals they are working on now go well, the building will be 100 percent leased before it opens.

One of the tenants will be Nathan Glenn, owner of Rooster's and Basil's restaurants. Glenn will opening The Auditorium, a restaurant and entertainment venue in the old Duling School.

"We're leaving the original stage in the auditorium and we'll have live entertainment," he said. "We'll have everything from music to theater and even live cooking demos. And the venue has dictated the menu. We'll be serving Mississippi Gulf Coast seafood, Delta catfish and North Mississippi barbeque."

The restaurant will have a full service bar with premium poured drinks.

"There's really nothing else like it in the area," said Glenn. "Every seat in the house will have a good view of the stage."

Adjacent to the school, on the corner of Duling and North State, a new office building is going in that will house Cooke, Douglass, Farr & Lemons LTD architects, a branch of BankPlus and The Ramey Agency, an advertising agency now in Ridgeland.

"About a year or so ago we started thinking about what we wanted to do when our lease in our current building expired," said Chris Ray, CEO and partner at Ramey. "We looked all over the metro area trying to find the most interesting place with the best financial terms. We all loved what was going on in Fondren. There is a creative buzz that just charges around the whole area."

Ray said they take a little delight in bucking the trend by being a company moving back to Jackson instead of out of the city.

"It doesn't hurt that we'll be able to walk across the street and get one of those great milk shakes from Brent's Drugs."

Because the agency thinks it's important to come in as a good corporate citizen, it's donating $10,000 worth of in-kind services to the Fondren Renaissance Foundation, to assist with branding and creating a 'corporate identity' for the Fondren neighborhood.

"It's the right thing to do," Ray said. "We are going to be a part of the neighborhood and we are excited about getting in on the ground floor of this development and watching the area grow."

The development's third phase is Hotel Indigo, a boutique hotel to be on the corner of Duling and Old Canton Road.

"From what I heard," Peters said, "the president of Intercontinental Hotels was in town to meet with some other franchisees, and they took him to eat at Walker's. He took a look around the Fondren area and said he's building a hotel here."

The hotel will be four stories and will have underground parking. Construction will begin in early summer.

"It's all just developing so well," Charles Richardson, executive director of the Fondren Renaissance Foundation, said. "From a personal standpoint, it excites me when I drive south on State Street and see the cranes and construction from as far away as Council Circle. It's just the coolest thing for me to see the continued progress in Fondren.