Jimmy Moses

James Alfred "Jimmy" Moses (born September 11, 1949) is founder of Moses Tucker Real Estate and a prominent Little Rock-area commercial developer and urban planner. Moses started the company which bears his name in 1984. His partner in the firm is Rett Tucker. Moses conceived the idea of a Little Rock River Market in the 1980s following a visit to the Pike Place Market in Seattle, Washington.

Early Life and Education

Moses hails from a pioneer Little Rock Jewish family. He attended Jefferson Elementary in the 1950s and graduated from Hall High School. In high school Moses worked at the family business, Moses Melody Shop, a music and electronics store located on Main Street in downtown Little Rock. Moses Melody Shop had been established by his grandfather Alfred Moses, but had by the 1960s passed into the hands of his father James Moses Sr. The competing music store at the time was called Madcats. In 1967, his senior year, Moses served as class president.

After high school, Moses attended the then-all male Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. Returning to Little Rock and Moses Melody Shop in 1971, Moses dedicated his spare time to a local association of downtown boosters and civic organizers known as Little Rock Unlimited Progress. Little Rock Unlimited Progress had been formed into 1970 to revive the prospects of downtown retailers. The group inherited the spirit of two prior failed downtown revitalization campaigns known as Main Street 1969 plan, established in 1957, and the 1960s Capitol Place plan. Moses had followed the Capitol Place plan closely in high school. Capitol Place involved an underground plaza and parking ramp at the corner of Main Street and Capitol Avenue. Remembered Moses later, "I was fascinated. I lived and died that." The plan never materialized.

While serving as executive director of Little Rock Unlimited Progress Moses dreamed of a fashionable pedestrian mall along Main Street that would bring energy and dollars to a downtown deflated by snarled parking and flight to the western suburbs.

Moses quickly tired of the day-to-day operations of his father's store. In November 1975 Moses remembers a conversation with his father in which he admitted: "Dad, I'm kind of sick of this." James Sr. was also tiring of the weight of daily affairs at the store and promptly sold Moses Melody Shop. In March 1976 Moses packed his wife B.J., the kids, and a dog into the family Volvo station wagon to study urban and regional planning at the University of Florida at Gainsville. He later remembered thinking: "I was never coming back. I was pretty burned out on Little Rock. Downtown was clearly on a slide. The leadership was very thin. We didn't seem to have much vigor in making it a great place. And I was tormented by the fact that I couldn't make more of an impact."

Moses would later say that the decision to leave Little Rock marked a major "turning point" in his life, but he also quickly realized how much his hometown meant to him. "After four to six weeks, I realized something was missing. It was the Arkansas Gazette. So I called and said, 'Send it to me.' It was like an umbilical cord. I saw my roots were so deep and I was really passionate about Little Rock."

Metrocentre Mall

Moses continued to sell his idea of a Little Rock pedestrian mall as an engine of revitalization in his master's thesis completed in 1978 and entitled "Assessing the Impact of Central Business District Redevelopment Organizations on Downtown: A Case Study of Little Rock Unlimited Progress, Inc." That same year his idea for a pedestrian mall along Main Street was realized with the opening of the Metrocentre Mall. "As kids growing up in Little Rock some of my fondest memories are of [business associate] Wally [Allen] and I both working downtown on Main Street," remembered Moses. "We'd go eat lunch together. And one of our favorite things to do as kids was take the bus downtown. There used to be this great barbecue place called Tom and Andrew's. At 15 or 16, we'd always order a beer with our barbecue, but they'd never give us one. That was kind of the way we functioned back then. I think that even as kids, both of us working and hanging out on Main Street in downtown Little Rock had some lasting impact on both of us wanting to see great things happen for the city[.]"

The Metrocentre Mall project involved closing Main Street between Third and Seventh streets and Capitol Avenue from Scott to Louisiana streets. Bricks were laid on the pavement, willow oaks and crape myrtles were planted, and a large fountain was constructed at the corner of Third and Main beginning in March 1977 at a cost of $4.5 million dollars. The project was paid for by local property owners organized into what was known as the Metrocentre Improvement District No. 1. The plan did not work. John Flake of Flake and Company was the first to call for rehabilitating the street to accommodate cars. Except for one block on Capitol from Main to Louisiana, all the streets were reopened to auto traffic in 1990 at a cost of more than $1.5 million dollars. Nine years later the pedestrian mall on that last block of Capitol disappeared as well. Longtime Metrocentre executive director Sterling Cockrill Jr. noted that the plan failed as "newcomers constructed around the pedestrian mall but not on it. They didn't want to be where cars couldn't get to them."

In 1987 the Metrocentre Improvement District launched a new economic revitalization project under the direction of Main Street Ventures known as Main Street Market. Main Street Market incorporated five buildings located between Capitol Avenue and Sixth Street in creating a $12 million mixed use multilevel indoor shopping center, office complex, art gallery walk, and restaurant hub. This project also foundered. No one considered rerouting one-way streets so that cars were led towards the facility instead of away. Architect Reese Rowland has since said that Main Street Market also failed because it had only two entrances that could not be directly accessed by pedestrians at street level. Jimmy Moses took over management of the facility in 1990 just as Leader Federal Savings Bank of Memphis called in the original loan against the property. Moses offered the bank two possibility for resuscitating the Mall, turning it into an office and entertainment complex or turning it over as strictly office space. The bank chose to sell off the property as office space, cutting its losses. Today thirty state government agencies thrive on the dissected Main Street Market block.

In the last decade Jimmy Moses has begun to emphasize the positive aspects of these failed projects, emphasizing instead the most successful aspects of the Metrocentre Improvement District's activities. For instance, between 1973 and 1997 district property owners pooled special annual assessments and gave out $50 million in loans for twenty-one startups and improvement projects. Approximately $750 million in new improvements came into the district, including the TCBY Tower. The District also approved the construction of two parking ramps, one bounded by Second, Main, Scott and Third streets, and the other encompassed by Sixth, Scott, Main and Seventh streets in the mid-1980s. "People are real quick to point to things that didn't work, but I see them as small steps that brought us to where we are today. When people look back at the 20th century, those projects - the malls, the parking lots - will be seen as things that helped bring about future development." But Moses also learned an important lesson: "Traditional retailing and downtown as we knew it was dead." Shoppers fled in their cars in droves for places like the new McCain Mall in North Little Rock. One by one retailers closed their doors: JCPenney, Zale's, Woolworth's, Haverty's, Stifft's jewelry store, Baker's Shoes, Mangle's, Gold's House of Fashion, and Kempner's. Even Moses Melody Shop could not escape the writing on the wall. Even old community pillars like Dillard's and M. M. Cohn's would close their downtown department stores by 1990.

These merchants represented only the latest wave in a long history of storefront closings along Main Street since the 1950s: Blass, Pfeifer's and the Pfeifer Home Center, Walgreen's, Sears Roebuck, McLellan's, Economy Drugstore, Franke's, Arkansas Carpet and Furniture, Cave's Jewelers, National Shirt Shop, Worthen Bank, Bauman's Men's Store, Standard Luggage, Allsopp and Chapple Bookstore, the Center Theater, and Lido Cafeteria. In 2005 Moses admitted that "Main Street is dead. It is dismal. I'm not trying to be a bad ambassador, but there's nothing for any group to come and regularly see or do."

Condominium Development

Tuf-Nut Lofts (1999)

Arkansas Capital Commerce Center (2002)

First Security Center (2004)

300 Third Tower (2007)

River Market Tower (2009)

References

• Julian E. Barnes, "Jimmy Moses: The Man Has a Vision to Give Life to Downtown Little Rock, June 9, 1996.
• Julian E. Barnes, "Jimmy Moses the Man with a Vision," Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, June 6, 1996.
• Kyle Brazzel, "James A. Moses: Success Finally Came Downtown for Jimmy," Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, October 21, 2001.
• JoBeth Briton, "Project 2000 and the Diamond: A City Wrestles with its Future," Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, July 1, 1991.
• James A. Moses, "Assessing the Impact of Central Business District Redevelopment Organizations on Downtown: A Case Study of Little Rock Unlimited Progress, Inc.," M.A.U.R.P. thesis, University of Florida, 1978.

External links

• Homepage of Moses Tucker Real Estate