FAME

The Plan:

1. Texas Heritage Corridor

Texas Avenue is not a back street. It is Shreveport's main street, an address, our original connection to Texas.

In the years ahead, real estate investment along The Avenue will be driven by two factors: access and location. Zoom in. Interstates 20 and 49 provide the access. The benefits of location come from the connection The Avenue provides between downtown and I-49.

The head of Texas Avenue includes major investments led by the City and First United Methodist Church. The Shreveport Public Safety Complex sits at the other end. In between, The Avenue knits together a series of historic investments, including Holy Cross Episcopal Church, Antioch Baptist Church, Oakland Cemetery, and Old B'nai Temple.

Now step back further. Texas Avenue also connects the City's major future employment clusters. On the one end sits the riverboats and entertainment. On the other end sits InterTech Science Park, a broad- based partnership of community, business, government, and medical insitution.

The Texas Trail Heritage Corridor connects Shreveport both to its past and its future.

2. Anchor Development Opportunities

To strengthen the Texas Avenue Corridor, this plan focuses on re-investing in tourism, history, and entertainment. Our geographic target represents an area approximately equal to the size of downtown. Hard edges of the freeways provide both access and definition to our development area.

We build our plan anchor investments. These investments promote economic development by attracting a critical mass of people and talent. They also provide a spawning ground for new businesses.

The city and the State Legislature have already made a major financial commitment to a major ancho, the Municipal Auditorium investment is required to complete the restoration. In addtion to the restored Municipal, we need additional, new anchor investments.

• Southern American Music Museum (SAMM) will be a campus complex of interconnected
  buildings to house collections of Southern music, performance space, retail space, and a
  digital media business accelerator. The design of the building will integrate the living
  museum of the Municipal with a newly restored Calanthen Temple.
• Digital Media Business Accelerator provides a platform for new business development in
  digital media. Shreveport can use this platform to establish a major new entertainment
  business cluster that combines Southern music, digital technology and business
  development. The Accelerator will include college and university partners organized through
  the Consortium for Education Research and Technology (CERT).
• Calanthean Temple provides an oppurtunity to provide a home from which to grow the
  Multi-Cultural Center and a potential entertainment venue. Built by the Court of Calanthean,
  an African-American Women's organization in 1923, the building provided offices for lawyers,
  doctors and other business people. In its rooftop garden, the upper echelons of black society
  in Shreveport held balls and danced to performances by Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, and
  Duke Ellington.
• Oakland Cemetary represents the city's oldest and perhaps most important historic landmark. The oldest gravestone dates to 1842, three years after the founding of Shreveport. It provides
  a tapestry of the city's history and can be transformed into a significant tourist attraction.
• Old Galilee Baptist Church provides an oppurtunity to develop a Civil Rights Museum and the
  role of Shreveport's African- American leaders in this struggle. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke at the church in 1958 and 1962. Saved from demolition in 1994, the City now owns the church.
• B'nai Zion Temple provides an excellent example of Greek Revival architecture erected in 1915. This remarkable building is largely unaltered and could serve as the home of a new Jewish museum that could document the history and influences of Jews on the development of the South.

Our goal inresidential development is to create a new residential option for Shreveport: an in-town neighborhood that offers a pedestrian-oriented urban lifestyle for young professionals and "empty nesters".

Most residential developments in Shreveport-Bossier are oriented to the automobile. Our residential strategy is to re-create the diverse, urban lifestyle that dominated neighborhoods around The Avenue: Ledbetter Heights grew as a working class neighborhood in Shreveport's early histoy; Austin Place includes historic homes of the emerging wealthy elite.

Like many cities, downtown Shreveport has suffered from the easy access that highways began to provide an option to this suburban sprawl.

Our target investment are has remarkable potential for residential development. it offers amenities and infastructure to support creative residential housing types that are oriented to pedestrians. The challenge will be to create a residential market near The Avenue that appeals to young professianals and empty nesters.

We start with some strong assets. They include a walakable neighborhood, open green space, available land, and nearby churches and heath care. As Texas Avenue develops, new amenities -- including resturants entertainment, and available incubator space -- will add to the attractions. We will have to overcome perceptions that in-town residential development is strictly for low income residents.

Our specific odjectives will be to encouraged a mixed-use residential community;take advantage of residential infill opportunities; encourage upper floor residential living along Texas Avenue; build new, varied residential housing types' and follow urban design standards that reinforce neighborhood integrity.

4. Entertainment Development Opportunities

The remarkable sucess of the CenturyTel Center in Bossier puts Shreveport -Bossier on the national map as a major regional entertainment market. Shreveport can contribute to this sucess by adding high quality entertainment venues should build on our musical creativity and continue to develop our deep musical traditions in blues, jazz, rockabiliy, rock n' roll and country music.

Churches throughout the district will assist us in promoting Texas Avenue as a family-oriented entertainment district and an area of the city that encourages social interaction, a district that is open and supportive of the diverse cultures that make up Shreveport.

We envision a range of live music venues along The Avenue that will combine to make a vibrant music scene in Shreveport. In addition we define entertainment opportunites to include galleries, historic tours, museums, and themed restaurants

Both tourists and knowledge workers are drawn to an active steet life. Texas Avenue will become a Live-Work-Play enviroment where young people can work in a cool, converted building, live in a loft down the street, and listen to music or visit an art exhibit nearby.

Entertainment is a core element to attracting and keeping knowledge workers. Austin had music before it had high tech. The same is true for Seattle and Portland. All three of these cities have followed a powerful development stategy: high tech, smart growth and cool lifestyle.

5. Music Business and Digital Media Opportunities

A new communication age is dawning -- one in which the media teaches, informs and entertains -- one which will be profoundly interactive.

In just a few years most Americans will be connected to each other by digital media: digital television, interactive newspapers, high speed Internet access, a wireless Internet and the capability to produce high quality media of their own.

These changes present major oppurtunitiesfor Shreveport-Bossier.

New media provides the oppurtunities for young people to develop exciting and rewarding careers. It provides the opportunity for Northwest Louisiana to recruit profitable businesses eager to build on one of our major resources: creativity. It also provides the opportunity for the Consortium for Education Research and Technology (CERT) to enhance its reputation as a technologically sophisticated organization representingpost-secondary institutions in Northwest Louisiana. In short, new media offers us the opportunity for our young people, our universities, our region and our state to assume leadership roles in one of the world's fastest growing fields.

Our vision is to support and nurture the efforts of artisits and content of artists and content creators eager to employ technology to buildd entertainment products for a global audience that are based on our deep traditions of Southern music. To provide the catalyst for this business development, we are recommending the formation of the Center for Creative Digital Media. This Center, located within the Southern American Music Museum, would operate as a Business Accelerator. The Center will operate in partnership with the CERT.

6. Retail Business Opportunities

Street level retail will restore the vitality of Texas Avenue. Our plan envisions three major market supports for retail development: neighborhood residents, tourists, and conventioneers and local office workers.

A permanent base of residents will provide new stores and restaraunts with regular customers, who spend morethan office workers. They will signal visitors that the streets are safe to walk and shop.

The strongest location for neighborhood and tourist retail development exists retail development exists along the 800 block of Texas Avenue and Common Street. We envision restoring the retail fabric, including, for example, re-establishing and Italian grocery along the Avenue.

A wide variety of retail can eventually be supported, included high end resturants and galleries, local "amenity" retail. street side cafes and resturants will add to the mix.

Street level retail should be reserved for buisnesses that can transform the character of The Avenue. Proffessional offices and residences should be located iun the upper levels. this approach will enshure that the street front will be visually exciting and inviting.

An active street life is importnat to create an enviroment of openness and diversity. These type of neighborhoods attract knowledge workers. Today, The Avenue continues to be the home of furniture retailers. These businesses represent as vital part of The Avenue economy. We belive efforts should be made by local economic developers to strengthen and promote these busineses as Furniture Row, clustered near Texas Avenue and Murphy, not unlike an auto mall with easy Interstate access.

Phase 1 of the development plan calls for 125,000 to 140,000 square feet of retail and comercial development space. Our projections show that this available space can be easily absorbed within the next five years among resturants, live entertainment venues, neighborhood retail and destination retail.

7. Hotel Development Opportunity

With its $85 million investment in a new convention center, Shreveport is making a major push into the convention and meetings market. The municipal Auditorium complements this strategy by providing a lower cost venue that can me marketed to religious and non-profit groups.

The vacant townsend Furniture building on Texas Avenue provides the headquarters hotel for the Municipal. Renovated as suites hotel, the building could provide 100 rooms with 20,000 square feet of ground floor support for retail, resturants or meeting space.

With sufficiant market support, new construction could add 200 rooms and a 13,000 square foot atrium space. The new hotel building would be located in the same block, connected by the atrium space that aligns with Grand Avenue.