Back to issue home page

• Chattanooga, 6028 Shallowford Road, No. 200, in the Friar’s Branch Shopping Center.

• Johnson City, 2517 Knob Creek Road, in the Knob Creek Marketplace.
• Knoxville, 9289 Kingston Pike, in the Cedar Springs Shopping Center.
• Memphis, 5266 Summer Avenue, No. 75, in the Perimeter Shopping Center.
The lottery’s headquarters are located in Nashville at 200 Athens Way in MetroCenter.

Chattanooga

Veteran Steak & Shake manager Mark Richman and former Shapiro’s owner Bob Dial teamed up to open C.J.’s Grill, a Texas-style eatery on East Brainerd Road. Utilizing a Texas/Western theme that includes large screen televisions that play old Western movies, C.J.’s Grill is a non-smoking, alcohol-free establishment with a build-your-own-hamburger bar. A placard on the door reads “Christian-friendly restaurant.” The restaurant is named after Richman’s fiancee, Charlotte Janey Dyar, a kindergarten teacher.

Chattanooga real estate investment trust CBL & Associates purchased for $71 million an enclosed mall and the adjacent shopping annex in Bel Air, Md. Built in 1973, the mall property is anchored by Hecht’s and Sears and is about 95% full. The annex is anchored by Best Buy, PETsMART, Gardiners Furniture and Dollar Tree. Formed in 1993, publicly traded CBL owns regional malls and community shopping centers primarily in the Southeast and the Northeast.

Clarksville

Wexford Capital Partners, an affiliate of Chicago-based Wexford Bancgroup, purchased Commerce Center Phase 1 & 2 of the Clarksville Business Park from seller Jim Amos for $3.5 million. The 81,000-square-foot property houses tenants including Charter Communications, Clarksville Lighting & Appliance, Anheuser-Busch, Premier Medical Group, Tennessee Department of Health and Graybar Electric. In December 2002, Wexford purchased Space Park North and Old Stone Bridge industrial parks for $23.5 million. One year before that purchase, Wexford bought the Reemay distribution center on Myatt Drive in Madison for $11 million.

Johnson City

Commercial real estate developer Stewart Taylor of Taylor Properties in Kingsport outbid Johnson City officials by $11,000 to purchase an 8.5 acre property owned by TVA that was once owned by Revolutionary War hero Robert Young. The property is located in the Med Tech Corridor, an area largely owned by the city where development has been restricted to medical and professional development. The city had wanted to turn the property into a park. However city officials poorly concealed that its high bid would be the $3.1 million TVA set as a minimum bid. Taylor, the auction’s only other bidder, bid $11,000 more to secure the property. Environmentalists had expressed concern about the sale since the land contains five American beech trees that historians say are several hundred years old. Taylor says though he expects to make the trees a feature of an overall plan, he intends to develop the land for commercial use to include shops and restaurants.

Knoxville

As part of a plan to cut its total office space by 15 percent, the Tennessee Valley Authority has put on the market two Class A office towers of its downtown headquarters. The utility wants to sell both towers and lease one back for its use.

Memphis

FedEx Supply Chain Services leased 80,000 square feet in Corporate Park in a space recently vacated by Ozburn-Hessey Logistics. Trammell Crow Co., representing the landlord, St. Paul Properties, leased the Class B property. St. Paul Properties owns approximately one million of the park’s 1.7 million square feet of industrial space. FedEx Supply Chain Services was acquired by FedEx in 1998 as part of its purchase of Akron, Ohio-based Caliber Systems.

Atlanta-based Summit Management Corp. announced plans to spend up to $6 million on the renovation of the historic Kress Building downtown. The 50,000-square-foot building will be transformed into a 46-room annex for the Spring Hill Suites by Marriott located next door. The building has been closed since 1994. Plans call for opening the hotel in the spring or early summer of 2005.

The 10,000-seat McCarver Stadium at the Mid-South Fairgrounds that once served as the home field of the Memphis Redbirds will likely be demolished this summer, according to officials with the Memphis Parks Division. The stadium, built in the 1950s, was vacated by the Redbirds when they moved into the brand new Autozone Park in 2000.

Sales of Memphis-based Crye-Leike Realtors topped $3.5 billion in 2003, the 2,800-employee company’s best showing in 26 years in business. Crye-Leike reached sales of $3.17 billion the year before. Crye-Leike is the nation’s 10th largest real estate company and the largest in the Southeast.

Nashville

Brentwood-based Boyle Nashville purchased One and Two Corporate Centre in Cool Springs for $36 million. The two Class-A buildings, at I-65 and Cool Springs Boulevard, total almost 281,000 square feet and house tenants such as CIGNA, General Electric Capital Corp., Franklin American Mortgage, Manchester Tank and Astra Zeneca.

A new 31-story condominium tower to be called Viridian will be built next to the L&C Tower in downtown Nashville before the end of 2006. Developer Tony Giarratana and Atlanta-based partner Jim Borders of the Novare Group are leading the $55 million development, which will include 225 units. The building will be anchored by a 6,000 square-foot grocery store: an H.G. Hill's Urban Market. The developers will be eligible for $6 million in tax-increment financing. AmSouth is providing financing for the project.

Oak Ridge

The U.S. Department of Energy declared as excess property one of the nation’s first centers for nuclear medicine. The property will be transferred to Methodist Medical Center of Oak Ridge in 2005. The 59,000-square-foot building is likely to be razed for future development. Located at 140 Vance Road, the property originally served as a general hospital for Oak Ridgers working on the atomic bomb. It became home to one of the first cancer-research hospitals where radiation treatments were developed and tested.

Back to issue home page

Email to a Friend Print-Friendly Format