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. "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[.]"

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.

Little Rock Unlimited Progress

While serving as executive director of Little Rock Unlimited Progress after college, 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. But he 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 becoming weary of his store duties and sold Moses Melody Shop that same month. 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 Gainesville. 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."

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 coming to fruition with the opening of the Metrocentre Mall. The Metrocentre Mall project involved closing Main Street between Third and Seventh streets and Capitol Avenue from Scott to Louisiana streets. Beginning in March 1977 construction crews laid bricks on the pavement, planted willow oaks and crape myrtles, and constructed a large fountain at the corner of Third and Main 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.

AMR Architects

Moses was lured back to Little Rock in 1978 by a job offer tendered by developer Tommy Hodges of Hodges, Vines, Fox, and Associates. Hodges assigned Moses the task of preparing urban plans for the revitalization of small Main Street communities like Crossett, Harrison, and Magnolia. These reports generally had no direct impact on the cities. But in 1981 he completed a report on his hometown called the "Downtown Little Rock Development Plan" in which he detailed several ways to bring back "a certain charm and character unique to the downtown." In the report he recommended a central market facility, new restaurants and bars, and a renewed emphasis on retailing.

On Tuesday evenings during the years he worked for Hodges Moses would get together over drinks with two architect friends John Allison and Rick Redden. "I guess there was sort of an attachment," remembered Redden of the informal group. "We were so naive. We were young. We thought about anything could happen." Invariably the discussions turned in the direction of forming a new company specializing in urban design and development. Remembered Moses later, "About the 11th or 12th month, one of us said, 'Drinking this Scotch is good, but we're going to turn into alcoholics. Maybe we better start a business or stop meeting like this.'"

In 1982 the group agreed to form AMR Architects. Allison, Moses, and Redden envisioned a different kind of firm, one devoted to refurbishing existing building stock in the neglected downtown and managing these assets themselves. They also dreamed of a central farmer's market that would form the centerpiece of a new arts and entertainment district. Allison and Redden took on the primary roles of architects in the firm, and Moses accepted the duties related to promoting, leasing, and managing the projects as they developed.

The first project the new team tackled was the old Gans Building located at 217 West Second Street, which the three principals also used as their first office. The next project involved the rejuvenation of two buildings on East Markham Street into the Heritage Center East and West. Their plan involved renovation of two buildings and demolition of a building in between to create adjacent parking. The department of Arkansas Heritage became the main tenant in Heritage Center East, and AMR Architects took over a top floor, sharing it with an apartment for Redden's family.

The group became successful enough to form a subsidiary company named AMR Real Estate. AMR Real Estate, focusing on development deals and property management in the western suburbs, built up the group's fortune rapidly. In 1984 Moses left AMR to focus on this part of the business, forming a partnership with Jim Nosari called Moses-Nosari Real Estate. Redden continued to retain the AMR Architects namesake.

Little Rock Downtown Partnership (1984)

Development in West Little Rock became Jimmy Moses' bread-and-butter, but his sympathies remained attached to the central core. By 1984 Little Rock Unlimited Progress had evolved into the nonprofit Little Rock Downtown Partnership. Business and government leaders representing the new coalition began looking for development projects that could restart economic activity along neglected business corridors. Moses served as president of the group and Sharon Priest as its executive director.

In 1987 the Metrocentre Improvement District, which would later merge administratively with the Partnership, launched a new economic revitalization project named Main Street Market under the direction of a company called Main Street Ventures. Main Street Market merged five buildings located between Capitol Avenue and Sixth Street to create 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.

By the late 1980s it was clear that Metrocentre Mall and the Main Street Market were not working. Developer John Flake of Flake and Company was the first to call, in 1986, for rehabilitating the street to accommodate cars again. 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 block-long pedestrian mall on 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."

As Metrocentre Mall began to decline the Downtown Partnership hatched a $100 million plan to replace Barton Coliseum on the State Fairgrounds with a downtown multi-use sports arena. Quipped Partnership executive vice president Jack Turner at the time, referring to the failed Main Street Market: "Sometimes you have to level things to get people's attention."

Moses became an active booster, with childhood friends Mark Grobmyer and Wally Allen, of the scheme which the nonprofit optimistically called Project 2000. Eventually the project coalesced around a comprehensive plan with the $42.1 million arena, dubbed the "Diamond Center," surrounded by an improved Riverfront Park, an expanded Statehouse Convention Center, a new main branch public library, museums, repaired streets and sidewalks, and better policing and rental property inspection. The idea was to achieve economic growth by attracting corporations and a modern workforce with more visible amenities and better city services. "What we're doing is talking about what it would take to elevate this city to another competitive level with other cities in the country," noted Moses. Grobmyer, a corporate attorney by trade, agreed. "For a great city, you have to have a vibrant economy, you have to have people employed," he noted. "You have to start there. Everything flows from economics. Then you get rising real estate values, the schools are financed by property taxes and so on." Allen, chair of the Little Rock Advertising and Promotion Commission, estimated that Project 2000 would create 3,500 new entry-level jobs.

Moses, Grobmyer, and Allen tied a civil rights component to the plan by suggesting the building of a museum for ongoing study and reflection that would help restore the "self-image" of a city shattered in the 1957 Central High School desegregation crisis. Moses and Allen took their organization's pitch everywhere, to city government offices, to churches and clubs, and into the workrooms other nonprofits. They also worked hard to secure the support of African American residents of the city, a group often neglected in Little Rock's urban revitalization plans. "Wally and I used to trudge out for speeches on a cold Tuesday night to some civic club at the end of the county," Moses remembered. "It was one of those challenges you weren't always up for, and I would call Wally up and ask if he were ready to go again, and he always was. Knowing the odds were not in our favor, he was still there, side by side with me, willing to work hard till the end."

On October 8, 1991, the citizens of the city took to the polls and rejected two half-cent local sales tax increases earmarked for capital improvements and city programs. Jim Lynch of the Coalition of Little Rock Neighborhoods was especially vocal in denouncing the tax increase, which he argued would hurt the lowest socioeconomic classes most. The project was also opposed by Arkansas Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), which wanted a different timetable for improvements to city infrastructure. Two years later the plan, rebranded as the Future-Little Rock Project, failed again. Future-Little Rock also recommended a downtown arena facility, but the funding mechanism was divided into two separate tax proposals. The first, a one-cent hike in the hotel and restaurant tax designated for doubling the square footage of the Statehouse Convention Center, failed on October 14, 1993. The second vote for a one-cent increase in the sales tax to finance the arena and public safety and emergency services failed two months later on December 14th.

After the defeat of both Diamond Center bids Moses and the Downtown Partnership refocused its energies on new plans developed by MRA International Inc. of Philadelphia and the Donaghey Project at UALR to create a zone in the heart of the city that would include niceties like upscale restaurants, boutiques, a farmer's market and marina, and a multipurpose arena. On May 20, 1994, the plan for an "American Commons and Festival Landing" was unveiled to the public. The accompanying report made several key recommendations, including the formation of a public-private development corporation to build an entertainment district bounded by the Arkansas River and Third Street to the north and south and I-30 and Broadway to the east and west. The proposed zone was called the "River District," which would encompass a downtown "campus" for conventions, conferences, festival events, and learning centers linked to the "information superhighway (the "American Commons" part), and a farmer's market, sports center, "discover center," and children's museum (the "Festival Landing" part).

In 1995 Pulaski County voters finally passed a one-cent tax to expire after one year to pay for the convention center improvements and an arena on the other side of the river in North Little Rock. The multipurpose sports complex would eventually be named ALLEL Arena. Moses, Grobmyer, and Allen didn't have anything to do with the county plan. Said Allen later, "I don't think we were wrong, because here today we have the expansion, we have the new arena. Politically, we may have gone about it wrong. Well, obviously we did because we failed. But I do think that effort opened the eyes of the people of Little Rock and central Arkansas that if we were ever going to move this city forward then we citizens have to do something, and generally that comes back to paying for something. So even though it was a personal defeat, I feel like years later we've seen a return on those efforts, and they've all been made worth it to me."

Clinton Library (1997)

Challenged by the Future-Little Rock Project, the decision to site the Clinton Library in Little Rock, and the loss of the arena to North Little Rock the Little Rock Planning Department crafted a new document called the "Downtown Little Rock-Framework for the Future." The document was laid before the Little Rock Board of Directors at a meeting on October 19, 1999.

Condominium Development

Tuf-Nut Lofts (1999)

Arkansas Capital Commerce Center (2002)

First Security Center (2004)

300 Third Tower (2007)

River Market Tower (2009)

Over the past 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."

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.
• "Tale of Two Taxes; Chances Slim for LR Arena, but Half-Cent Tax Stands Chance," Arkansas Business, November 15, 1993.

External links

• Homepage of Moses Tucker Real Estate