Chesterfield Village Update

Once it was known as Kickapoo Prairie Farm, 325 acres southwest of Springfield where Lester E. Cox operated the first authorized tractor training school in the country for Ford tractor distributorships. From 1944 until 1963, more than 3,000 dealers, salesmen and service men attended classes there.
Today, the area near the farm is even busier, with more than 41,000 cars traveling on nearby Kansas Expressway and James River Freeway daily. But Ford tractor enthusiasts aren’t flocking there. Instead, it’s the workers, shoppers and residents of Chesterfield Village, built on approximately 125 acres by Cox’s heirs.
Envisioned as a center for retail, restaurants and offices, Chesterfield Village has evolved other the years. “That’s always the case,” Larry Lipscomb said.
Lipscomb founded Dearborn Development with other members of the Cox family to create a new center with the charm of older buildings in 1993. Chesterfield Village now is home to a variety of businesses and has evolved as needed.
The evolution continues as planners seek a tenant to fill the 6,000-square-foot restaurant space formerly occupied by McGuffey’s. The restaurant closed Dec. 12.

Emptiness
Melissa Owens, director of management information systems at McGuffey’s corporate office in Asheville, N.C., said the company was unable to renegotiate the lease on the space it had occupied since 1995. The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in North Carolina in January 2004, but Owens said that was not a factor in the company’s decision to leave Springfield.
“For two years (Springfield) was the No. 1 store in the company from a cost, profit and increase-in-sales standpoint,” Owens said of the store’s performance in 2002 and 2003.
The company has no plans to open another store in the Springfield area.
Lipscomb tells a different story. He said McGuffey’s owed Dearborn a “considerable amount of money” for past rent.
Four potential tenants are looking at the restaurant space, said leasing agent Teresa Schwab of Wilhoit Property Management.
Even with McGuffey’s gone, Lipscomb is pleased with Chesterfield Village’s tenants.
“I would say total occupancy with everything that’s out there, there’s about 140,000 or 150,000 square feet. I’d say it’s at 95 percent occupancy,” he said. “There’s probably 9,000 or 10,000 square feet that’s available out of the 150,000 that’s out there.”
Rent at Chesterfield Village ranges from $9 to $14 per square foot, Schwab said.

Transformation
“Originally, the development was designed so that most of the space that you see on the ground floor that would have front door access to the street would be retail users, and then the second story space would be for office users,” Schwab said.
However, retail growth caught on near Battlefield Mall and Primrose Marketplace, which altered the mix for Chesterfield Village.
“Those areas kind of became a higher concentration of retailers, and so that moved the retail people away from southwest Springfield. But since then, office users basically have taken over the spaces that were originally designed to be retail” at Chesterfield Village, Schwab said. Newcomers include Bruning & Reagan Architects, Layne Morgan Media and Sportsman’s Park, The Neighborhood Pub.
More retail businesses used to line Chesterfield Boulevard, including Heritage Books, a florist, and clothing store The Rag Merchants.
“It’s hard to beat a Primrose shopping center or something like that where people are constantly going for the big box stores,” Lipscomb said. “We were always something different, a little unique, and we tried to cater to that.”
Lipscomb would like to see more retail move in.
“As we get density with residential and people there all the time, then some of that retail will come back in, and I think it will be little boutique-type shops that cater to people,” he said.
Schwab said that there are about 200 single-family homes in the development.
The popularity of residential lofts in downtown Springfield has Lipscomb thinking about creating a similar buzz in Chesterfield Village, but no plans are definite yet. “That’s a speculative thing – to build a loft apartment that’s new to be made to look old,” he said.

Thriving services
Service-oriented businesses, Schwab said, do very well at Chesterfield Village. Recent or ongoing construction includes Headache Care Center; Pension Consultants; Hazelrigg, Roberts and Easley PC; and Noble and Associates’ Noble II.
One that’s thriving is Chesterfield Cruise and Travel, founded by Donna Cambridge and Gail Peters in 1994.
The look of Chesterfield Village reminded them of the Crown Plaza area of Kansas City.
“We came out and looked at it and they were more than accommodating,” Cambridge said. “They made it very reasonable and we were able to do a contract that was not only affordable, but it gave us all the things we wanted because it was being built to our specifications.”
Cambridge and Peters operate their business from about 870 square feet, where they work with four employees.
“Now that we look back, years later, this has been a godsend for us,” Cambridge said. “We do 99 percent of our business on the phone, and the few walk-ins that we do (have) are coming especially to see us here in the area.”
More people are coming to Garbo’s Pizzeria as well.
Owner Pam Babcock said that she has experienced an increase in sales of 5 percent to 10 percent each year for the last few years. “I attribute that to more and more people living out in this direction,” she said. According to the 2000 Census, 54,805 people lived within a three-mile radius and 116,623 people lived within a five-mile radius of Chesterfield Village.
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