By Monica Chen

mchen@heraldsun.com; 419-6636

DURHAM -- To take retail in the City Center to the next level, the city should focus on emphasizing the culinary arts scene and establishing the district as a foodie center.

That's one of the conclusions of a retail report unveiled to Durham political and business leaders Thursday afternoon.

Focusing on the "Food and Beverage" segment, which includes all dining/nightclub/bars and other food-related establishments excepting grocery stores, would elevate the City Center's retail swiftly and efficiently, according to a pair of consultants from the Washington, D.C., area.

There aren't enough people living in the City Center -- the area within the downtown loop -- to support grocery stores and other neighborhood businesses, and suburban consumers can't be counted on to sustain demand when there are malls and shopping centers competing for their attention.

That leaves Food and Beverage businesses, a segment with an existing foundation in the City Center, that could highlight a unique element of that area, meet existing demand and possibly come to be a symbol of Durham.

"Food and Beverage meets these needs for you," said Heather Arnold, a consultant with Retail Compass. "It gives your culture another layer to organize around."

Of the 200 ground-level spaces in the City Center, 112 are retail-appropriate, the consultants found. Of those, only 39 are occupied by retailers. The remaining are vacant or occupied by non-retail users.

To begin to grow retail in the area, Arnold and retail architecture specialist Herb Heiserman said development efforts and incentives should focus on three existing "nodes," or locations for such businesses in the City Center.

Those nodes, which are Five Points, the stretch of Main Street from Mangum Street to Corcoran Street, and the area near the corner of Chapel Hill Street and Mangum Street, are located at intersections between thoroughfares into the City Center.

Restaurants and bars already have organically sprouted in those areas in recent years, including Rue Cler, Toast, Whiskey and Revolution.

In the next one to three years, the consultants said, the city should look into organizing a Business Improvement District, attracting and supporting the opening of five new food-based retailers and look at non-retail uses -- such as attorneys' and pediatricians' professional offices -- outside of the nodes.

Emphasis should be placed on filling up as many vacant storefronts in the City Center as possible, according to the consultants. Over time, as demand increases, the market will respond and tenants and landlords could opt to have more retail.

"When we first came to Durham, we looked around and wondered what happened here -- What happened that there are so many ground-level vacancies," said Arnold, who added that Durham's City Center had the most vacancies of any city she has surveyed.

To help bolster a living and working population in the City Center, the city should also study options to convert Mangum and Roxboro streets and the downtown Loop (which the consultants called "The Moat") into two-way streets.

To help potential retail tenants move into downtown, the city could also incentivize property owners to make more spaces equipped with the basic infrastructure that retailers need to set up shop -- the so-called "Vanilla Boxes," in architectural lingo.

And in keeping with Parrish Street's history as Black Wall Street, the city could "pursue African-American-owned professional offices to Parrish Street storefronts," the report also said. Although, Reginald Jones, Parrish Street project coordinator for the city, said after the meeting that the focus should be more on finding successful businesses in general. "The focus has to be on what's best for downtown," he said.

Bill Kalkhof, president of Downtown Durham Inc., the organization which commissioned the report, said they will take substantive comments from the meeting into account for the final report, which will be available to interested parties.

DDI hopes to have the final report by mid-January, after which, the organization will look into implementation of a plan for incentives, figure out who should manage and market the incentives and who will work with businesses through regulatory processes, as well as the retention and recruitment of businesses.

Kalkhof said they could market the City Center as a culinary destination, but acknowledged that doing so comes with the risk of pushing away other types of businesses.

For instance, Rock Paper Scissors Salon, a new salon and art gallery, opened this month several doors down from Rue Cler, in one of the nodes mentioned by the consultants that are suited for food and beverage businesses.

"There is clearly a risk," Kalkhof said. "That is something we need to look at carefully. Logically, we would want all of that, all of those businesses. Right now, we want to ask, "Could food be the foundation?'"