New Lifestyle For Little Rock
Schickel Development scheduled to open premier lifestyle center with brand new anchors for Little Rock this fall.
Susan H. Fishman

Pleasant Ridge Town Center is being developed by Schickel Development in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Schickel started his business venture with the opening of Schickel’s Cleaners in Southwest Little Rock and, over the years, expanded the company to four locations with more on the way. The Highway 10 location in Little Rock, at the site of Pleasant Ridge Town Center, is the highest volume dry cleaner in Arkansas. While building his dry cleaning business, Schickel began acquiring and developing real estate. Today, he’s known as a premier developer of lifestyle centers in Central Arkansas and is embarking on his largest project to date, a 310,000-square-foot town center in Little Rock, featuring a blend of national, regional and specialty retailers.

Pleasant Ridge Town Center is located opposite Pleasant Ridge West, a 30,000-square-foot neighborhood-oriented center, also developed by Schickel, that features restaurants, a spa and other retailers on the national and local level. The site is surrounded by churches, a medical complex, 800 high-end apartments, three banks, Schickel’s dry cleaners and Johnny Carino’s restaurant. A large portion of the land for the project was owned by the Schickel family.

“We’ve had some of the land for many years, but we assembled about half of the land in 2004 and 2005,” explains Schickel.

Currently under construction, the 310,000-square-foot lifestyle center will be anchored by a 120,000-square-foot Saks Parisian specialty department store and The Fresh Market grocery store, as well as a large bookstore, yet to be named. Saks Parisian and The Fresh Market are both new to the Little Rock area. Until now, Dillard’s has been the only dominant department store in Little Rock for the last 20 years.

“So having Saks Parisian at our site is a really big deal,” Schickel explains.

The center so far features six restaurants, which include Imagine Restaurant, Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream Shop, Camille’s Sidewalk Café, Harry’s Seafood, Prime Steak & Stone Crab, Crews Restaurant, along with other regional and national tenants, including Hallmark, Cingular Wireless, Strasburg Children, Moe’s Southwest Grill, Paul Michael, Warren’s Shoes, Red Robin and Threads City Wear.

Pleasant Ridge Town Center’s highly accessible location will permit Saks Parisian to serve the entire Central Arkansas market. The project is located at the intersection of Highway 10 and Interstate 430, where the traffic count is roughly 70,000 cars per day on the interstate and 40,000 per day on Highway 10. The center will serve a regional population of roughly 1 million within a 30-minute commute and is located in the middle of what could be called “Country Club central,” with seven nearby country and athletic clubs, including Pleasant Valley Country Club, Chenal Country Club, the Little Rock Athletic Club and Country Club of Little Rock.

“Jim Hathaway, who’s been in real estate around Little Rock for 50 years, has described it as the place ‘where the old money meets the new money,’” says Schickel. “And that’s a very good description.”

 “Some of the retailers we are talking to are Talbots, Victoria Secret, Ann Taylor, White House|Black Market, J. Jill, Coldwater Creek, American Eagle and Pacific Sunwear. Others that we think will follow are Banana Republic, Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie, Indigo, Children’s Place, Mimi Maternity and various local tenants,” says Schickel.

Designed by Birmingham, Alabama-based CMH Architects, the center will take a horseshoe shape with parking in the middle “at the door of every store,” says Schickel, and Saks Parisian at the center of the development. The project will be designed as an open-air village where guests shop in a pedestrian-friendly, park-like setting. It will feature extensive use of landscaping and hardscaping, as well as premium building materials, such as masonry on all four sides, brick pathways, fountains and bronze sculptures.

“It’s very similar to the Avenue projects in Atlanta — East Cobb and West Cobb,” Schickel notes.

Scheduled to open in October of this year, Pleasant Ridge Town Center is an exciting milestone for Schickel Development.  When completed, says Schickel, “it will rival the best shopping centers in the world.”