Northwest Arkansas will soon have a new place for visitors and locals to stroll through the woods.
In October 2019, Fayetteville voters approved a $226 million bond proposal, of which $31.7 million was designated for the development of the Cultural Arts Corridor along West Avenue in downtown Fayetteville. The project has since been renamed The Ramble, and its first phase, the renovation and improvement of the Fay Jones Woods and Razorback Greenway, is scheduled to be finished in May.
The Fay Jones Woods renovation installed new trails and walkways through the forest, which comprises most of the south and middle portions of the 50-acre development. The work was designed by Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects of Charlottesville, Virginia, through the Walton Family Foundation Design Excellence program. Nabholz Construction Corp. of Conway is the project’s general contractor.
“The draw of tourists and citizens to downtown businesses that surround the area and the life it is going to breathe into the commercial establishments is really endless,” said Peter Nierengarten, the city’s environmental director. “Dickson Street very much has a late night, Thursday-Friday-Saturday vibe and scene going on. It won’t add to that peak, but it will help fill in some of the valleys between it with more daytime and evening events that appeal to a broader segment of the population.”
The Ramble corridor runs along West Avenue — which actually runs north-south — and makes up a swath of space between the downtown hub and the University of Arkansas campus to the west. The Ramble ends at Dickson Street, the east-west street best known for its bars, restaurants and popularity among college students.
A large space in the middle of The Ramble is the West Avenue parking lot, directly across West from the Walton Arts Center. The city has wanted to replace the parking lot with something more economically productive for years, and The Ramble is its answer.
A Full Deck
The Ramble will replace the parking lot with a 12-acre civic plaza. The details have yet to be worked out, but the general idea is to have an open-air, non-structured plaza that lends itself to a host of activities.
The plaza construction is the last phase of The Ramble because the city knows it can’t remove a large parking lot in the middle of downtown without having a replacement ready. Finding downtown parking can be difficult in the best of times, so the city is building a multi-level, 310-capacity parking deck just north of Dickson Street to compensate for the loss of the lot.
The plaza work will begin when the parking deck is finished. Crews began construction in January and the city hopes the deck will be finished in 2023.
“The redevelopment of that parking lot has been part of the city’s plans for quite a while,” Nierengarten said. “It has been a little nebulous on what exactly that redevelopment would look like, but we recognized that parking lot in the middle of downtown was a missing tooth in the fabric of the downtown. We’ve seen those missing components, those missing teeth, and something needed to be there to bring a little more life and activity than a surface parking lot does.”
Fayetteville developers Greg House and Ted Belden are partners in the parking deck property. They also own a small 0.2-acre tract just south of Dickson that the pair plans to develop into a multiuse building.
The original proposal was for it to be a multistory food hall, with a restaurant on the roof overlooking Dickson and the civic plaza. House said he and Belden are still playing around with ideas of what exactly it will be but are more focused on getting the parking deck completed first.
“We call it the Civic Plaza Project; to be honest, we don’t know exactly what we are going to be doing,” House said. “The goal of the ground floor of the building is for it to be fairly open so folks can flow from Dickson through the building right out into the cultural arts park. We are trying to make both projects complement each other.
“This has always been kind of hole in Dickson in a sense. The more walkable the environment is, the more enlivened it is for everybody. This will fill in the gap between the east side of West Avenue and the west side. People will keep meandering and stop in and do something here.”
Economic Activity
The city obviously believes The Ramble will spur economic growth in the downtown area, a point of emphasis among many cities in northwest Arkansas in recent years.
“This 2019 bond project creates a new destination that will attract visitors and new business, add to our sales tax revenue and support the vitality and safety of our downtown and entertainment districts,” Fayetteville Mayor Lioneld Jordan said during his State of the City address in January.
Molly Rawn, the CEO of Experience Fayetteville, the city’s tourism department, said the combination of the Fay Jones Woods trails, the civic plaza and the proximity of the Dickson Street commercial venues is an exciting opportunity for Fayetteville.
“It combines a woodland experience and plaza in an urban park setting — something new for Fayetteville,” Rawn said. “[The Ramble] will be a place people want to spend time; most of that time will be free from structured activity, like in any park. Anytime we can bring more people to the downtown, economic activity follows as those people will shop in our stores, eat in our restaurants and drink in our bars.”
Nierengarten said downtown parking is important but the West Avenue lot was a poor use of available resources. Downtown land is a premium value, especially in a city such as Fayetteville.
“Parking is important and necessary, but we can be more efficient with the way we park cars downtown,” Nierengarten said. “That land is the most valuable real estate in northwest Arkansas, maybe in all of Arkansas. Now we are helping it realize its maximum value by turning it into space for people.
“This is pretty exciting stuff coming to downtown Fayetteville. It is going to be a huge shot in the arm for downtown and really the entire city of Fayetteville.”
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