The southwest corner of College Avenue and Township Street is set to receive a major facelift once Arvest Bank completes construction on a new 6,000-square-foot bank branch.
Photo: Todd Gill, Flyer staff
Arvest Bank officials will break ground on their newest Fayetteville location at 10 a.m. on Thursday, Dec. 20.
Preliminary site plans
The new branch will replace a long vacant car dealership at the southwest corner of College Avenue and Township Street.
Preliminary site plans called for a 6,000-square-foot, six-lane drive-through bank that includes nearly 40 parking spaces on the 1.92-acre lot.
Arvest plans to close a nearby location at 1947 N. College Ave. once the new branch is open.
A crew with Tulsa-based Ark Wrecking Co. is working this week to demolish the existing building at the west end of the lot.
Here are a couple photos taken Tuesday afternoon.
Glad to see long vacant lots being cleaned up and replaced with buildings that will be less of an eyesore and much less dreary. Sad to see this will free up a new building in the process though.
The newly-vacant building is in my part of midtown, but I’m not going to be too concerned about it It’s won’t be an eyesore even when it’s vacant. And with a perfect combination of size, parking, and high-traffic, I doubt that it will be vacant for long.
Very nice. It is good to see some renovation taking place. That intersection will look better for sure.
This will be an improvement for that lot but would have been even better with the building fronting College and all the parking spaces behind it.
Petty fought for this, but progressive thinking on developments seems to have gone out the window in this town. It is a missed opportunity. We’re getting strip development, but at least they are planting grass…. That seems to be this city’s level of sophistication at this stage.
Rather, it seems to be the level of sophistication of developers and owners at this stage. It is going to take a while longer to dig out of Bush’s magnificent recession, and as long as the economy is still not up to snuff, businesses– even banks owned by the munificent Walton family– are not going to go the extra mile like they used to. The city cannot force enlightened development practices on businesses.
The PC gets to approve every last development.
With few exceptions, developers are going to do whatever suits their bottom line the best, or however they have always done it.
Its disappointing to see virtually no recent developments outside the downtown core take any cues from the City Plan. This is just the most recent example.
Its wild to remember how many otherwise “good” developments the PC agonized over a few years back and failed to approve. The past few years it seems like everything gets approved, and that developments are done the way they were done in the 1990s. The grass and trees are nice, but a few tweaks of this site plan and the Kum & Gos would have made a major difference in establishing better development patterns and a better looking city.
I wish there was some middle ground. It seems like our PC was too restrictive in good times, and they are too permissive in tighter times. And every new development along MLK gets the standard pole sign. I’m sure this new Arvest will, too.
And Academy store got itself a big pole sign, after the rest of that entire area was developed without them.
Its disappointing. We were moving towards better, tamer development. And now its all going away.
I’d like to hear from one of the Planning Commissioner and have them explain why the city’s development standards have slipped backwards over the past five years.
To big pole signs- “ACK”
“The city cannot force enlightened development practices on businesses.”
Not sure what you mean by this. Could you elaborate? “Force” may be too forceful a word, but City Code? Planning Commission? Planning documents? Oversight from various departments and committees? and I’m sure there are other avenues of influence that I’m overlooking.
RE “Not sure what you mean by this.”
The city has not relaxed the development code since the halcyon days of Mr. Coody’s administration, and the Planning Commission, as it is filled from an applicant pool, is not really within the control of the city, either. Ultimately, the city can only enforce the code, which is the same as it was in the good old days. Blaming the city (meaning, if glutenfree is being consistent, blaming Lioneld Jordan) for the quality of recent development is silly.
No matter how much oversight is present, and no matter how many committees and departments are involved, the enforcement of development codes cannot be stretched beyond what is written. The development code does not require that this bank building be on the property line; the front setback for C-2 zoning is fifty feet. That is a wish that Arvest does not care to fulfill.
By the way, two of the nine current members of the Planning Commission– Porter Winston and Matthew Cabe– have been on the Planning Commission since 2007.
Dear some good restaurant with a thoughtful staff and class: Please buy/lease the old Arvest building. Give us a nice patio to sit and watch the traffic whiz by on College Avenue.
Maybe Coody can weigh in on this. He sure has been quiet since early November.
Guys it’s a bank. You need drive through lanes and parking. If you put it right on the street, you would have to give up one.
There is a new bank being built downtown, to replace the First Security Bank that is at College and Meadow.
Per the meetings about it, that bank is being configured in a manner with parking in the rear and drive-thrus to the side.
There are ways to situate all of these recent developments in a manner consistent with City Plan. Our Planning Commission simply doesn’t have the understanding of good design principles, or the will to encourage them. Its 90s thinking, and its disappointing.
The point of the City Plan was to encourage new development patterns, resulting eventually in an expanded area of our city being developed similarly to the urban core.
Instead, this Planning Commission is approving more strip-type development, typical setbacks, and more pole signage.
The property on question is zoned Downtown Core, for which the front setback is described as follows:
“The principal façade of a building shall be built within a build-to zone that is located between the front property line and a line 25 ft. from the front property line.”
Twenty-five feet is not enough room to put a single-loaded aisle of angle parking and an adequate sidewalk in front of a building. Better to consolidate available land space behind the building. That’s one reason the zoning is written this way. This is entirely different from the situation at College and Township, where there is a fifty-foot setback requirement.
I understand all of that. The same zoning setbacks and apparent right to signage also exist on South School, yet because of how the future land use is determined by City Plan, recent buildings have been set up closer to the road way.
Dollar General and The Grove apartments are examples done by a previous planning commission a few years back.
The point is the PC could be moving the city toward better development patterns. For whatever reason, this one isn’t.
And that is a problem specifically with the Planning Commission, rather than an indication that the whole city is going down the tubes.
Also, the Planning Commission cannot force a developer to apply for a variance, which the developers of Grove Apartments and the Dollar General store apparently had to do in order to get their projects to fit on the available land. Arvest Bank apparently sees no reason to apply for a variance, and there’s nothing the city– or the Planning Commission– can do about that.
DF, I know you’ll argue with a pile of jellybeans, but anyway….I’ve only posted about it being a PC problem. Don’t take it so personally.
The PC in the past encouraged developers to revise the zoning classification or revise the site plan to fit future land use patterns. There is always a use by right, but generally there was also a quid pro quo on virtually every commercial development. They apparently are no longer interested in doing this.
And the PC used to encourage developers to have ground-mounted signage. They no longer do this, either.
The point remains, the PC no longer seems interested in seeing that Fayetteville gets the development patterns we used to encourage. Watch the pole signs lining up, and watch the same old suburban strip development happening all over town. Watch a developer skirt the explicit restriction against signage along 540 by installing what amounts to a billboard on the front of their building as a part of their site plan. Watch, because its happening, and this PC approved it.
one must always remember who the planning commissioners are. That is why this lesser green crap passes.
Looks better than what is currently there. I’m happy with it.
Why did Academy get a pole sign?
phffftt
Its a good question. Now, any developer in that part of town who asks for one can point to Academy and expect that they will also get one.
The only thing that kept Joyce Blvd looking halfway decent is that its not cluttered with the same signage as the oldest parts of College Avenue. If you’re not a person who notices such things, pay attention to it the next time you drive down Joyce. You can actually notice the trees, stonewalls, and landscaping, instead of staring at giant pole signs everywhere.
Honestly, its a surprising and discouraging development. I guess we can expect the remainder of that area to be littered with similar tall signage because the people making these decisions no longer care about making this town look good. Why did they give up?
Glutenfree – have ever considered moving? You don’t really seem to like anything about Fayetteville much anymore.
I think it’s safer to assume that he/she cares about Fayetteville more than most. And active citizens that care about aesthetics should be thanked and applauded.