KJW

(Not a favorite project for me, personally). That being said: Looks like Steuart (the one in London?) and Tom were behind that one. ...they are Jim's boys... ......and this article makes me think your words are quite true, TRB (about keeping a watch on this section of Springdale). That being said, still wonder how many if any of the grandkids live here. Tom might be (the only?) one.

In the paper today...I wonder which members of the family, given that so many of the Walton grandkids live out of state (living trivia question for NWA "urban planeteers"...how many Walton grandkids DO live in northwest Arkansas)? And I really wonder how they will develop this area? : http://www.nwaonline.com/news/2014/jun/07/springdale-s-ryan-s-building-sells-2014/

(Not at all convinced that it's going to go through, but it would be kind of neat to have some more national brands such as Hillshire farms, Jimmy Dean Sausage, State Fair and Ball Park franks be headquartered in NWA if the Tyson/Hillshire proposed deal does indeed come to fruition. (fantasy smiley face eating a hot dog and wiping its mouth with a napkin, smiling))

Odd. There's an "NHM" that seems not that far away by NWACC, that really doesn't seem that far from here. I think the Centerton one is actually farther from the new one on Airport Rd. than this will be from the one near NWACC. BTW, sorry if I missed it but what again is that "outparcel" being built in front of the Comet Cleaners on Walton Ave. again?

New 15,000 sq ft online grocery pickup center to be built behind the Chambers Bank on Walton: Walmart: http://www.thecitywire.com/node/32916#.U2GQJPldWWY

UrbanArkie...so sorry to hear this. I thought it had just been quietly abandoned as some things were in the mid-2000s. The people behind that, in the article I read, had some VERY cool ideas. (EDIT: the only positive thing I can think about that is that man had a vision, and maybe (with the perhaps bigger but NOT-as-innovative rendering I saw on the sign yesterday north of Brownstone) said vision's time has come.)

Small tidbits: - No big surprise, but there's another strip mall/office center going in west of the new McDonald's on Regional Airport Road. The signs with the images of the property appear to have a logo on the rendering of the future building, as if a business has already located in here, but I couldn't read the logo driving by. - As with Hwy. 72 north and northwest of the future Bentonville West High school, "For sale" signs are going up all along Regional Airport Road in particular where the road curves to the south at a point west of the Kum and Go, then curves back west by the WM distribution center. I saw one sign where, again, an image of an apparent future warehouse/distro complex is depicted. (Cautionary note...remember that office building just west of WM DC, where the developer had innovative ideas including projecting old movies against the walls continuously from the outside (to those who weren't here when that was built a decade ago, I'm not joking)? It apparently stands vacant today. The apartments near it are thriving, but I hope the developers of this apparent future complex have taken heed.) - New cable lines are being laid on Forest Hills Drive south of Lancashire in Bella Vista. This is on the way from BV to the part of Gravette formerly known as "Hiwasse". I'm guessing that, like the area west of the new west Highway 72 bridge, Hwy 72 near BWHS mentioned above and the area near the WMDC, preparations are being made for expected growth between Bentonville's expansion, future I-49 and the expected wave of population to grow up around BWHS.

Mith, Since you're one of those who've been here the longest: read something sobering (in a good way) in today's ArDemGaz. It was an editorial, I believe, and it said that Sen. John Boozman, when he suffered his aortic rupture this week, couldn't have had the cardiovascular surgery in Rogers he received (that surely saved his life) a scant 12 years ago (when we moved here) in NWA. It said that even though time was of the essence, he likely could have been flown to a different city for care, but the choice was made to stay here. That's change we can live with indeed. The same article also said that NWA's congressman, Rep. Steve Womack (of Rogers, appropriately) is moving with the highest of "movers and shakers" within his party. Not sure I'm that happy about that (I'm more conservative than said "movers and shakers" seem to be) but that is NOT something I'll discuss here...rather, interesting how well he's apparently thought of after only a few terms in congress. The best news is about Sen. Boozman's care. With the medical school set to open in FSM in a few years and NWA surely going (well) beyond 500,000 after this summer, medical care will get better. The interesting thing will be to see whether Rogers or Fayetteville (or perhaps Springdale) are the center of that field in NWA. Most important thing, though, is that the medical care options are increasing.

Speaking of "activity" in the area: http://vimeo.com/garver/review/89646030/4f7e4ba5fa

Saw that myself just today. In other news (though not Bentonville-related, directly): I will bet that some art deals that will end up in Bentonville will be negotiated in THIS pad, said to be "the most expensive co-op in NYC history". Astonishing

UrbanArkie, could be. But TV stations are obviously driven by ad revenue, and national accounts look for numbers. With FSM and NWA adjoining each other via county borders and historic (despite the relatively recent addition of Benton County) media dominance, having the two metros combined into an 800,000 person entity will open up more ad dollars (as will whenever, if it happens, the Fayetteville/Rogers-Fort Smith DMA picks up more counties) to these stations. I would think splitting the market up would be committing a figurative seppuku for these stations. That being said, the situation we have here is kind of like (had it been so) the Little Rock DMA once being the Pine Bluff DMA for decades, with a station one day up and pulling out of the city of PB to move entirely to LR. FSM seems like it's becoming the "Pine Bluff" (or Conway, Hot Springs or Searcy) of the Fayetteville/Fort Smith DMA...but Fort Smith's metro is bigger than any of those latter cities which surround Little Rock. And the bigger I-49 gets down there, the bigger FSM will get. Still surprised by KNWA's move. But KPOM-TV was always the third banana in that market, anyway, it seemed. It was owned by Griffin Communications, which also owned the Griffin food distributorship (and Griffin's jellies and syrups, as I recall). They may not have been as savvy about owning media properties as other companies who are more focused on media matters, and that may have been what affected KPOM-TV's (future KNWA-TV's) status back in the day.

This still amazes me. Here's a CityWire story about construction activity being up in the Fort Smith area. Yet what sticks out to me is how the former KNWA-TV Fort Smith newsroom (which had been the newsroom, I believe for Fort Smith NBC affiliate KPOM a couple of decades ago when Benton County, AR was still in the Joplin-Pittsburg, KS TV market) is being converted into an immigration center! I'm not concerned about the future use of the building (though this is still noteworthy). Rather, that no matter what counties may be losing population, the NBC affiliate of the current Fayetteville-Fort Smith TV market has closed its Fort Smith (300,000 people in the five-county metro area, with perhaps 100,000 more to move there when I-49 is complete and Chaffee Crossing turns that part of the area "unrecognizeable" with its new Osteopathic Medical college, plus the future U.S. Marshals Museum, etc.) office. How many other U.S.A. media markets have had this happen, where a 300,000+ metro area which once was the media hub of the area has a network affiliate TV newsroom shut down due to the emergence of a genuine Orlando/Las Vegas-style (in terms of meteoric growth) "boom town" in the same market? Not many, if any, I'm guessing...

1. ...and then we see the growth in far east Fort Smith in the Chaffee area, and the home after home being built in the Centerton area, and it's a reminder: all this is happening on the Arkansas side. This past year a new business (Orscheln) and a new branch of Crowder College both opened in Jane, MO, but there is no attendant residential growth. As for Oklahoma (the two "Fort Smith" counties, Sequoyah and LeFlore, each lost a bit of population, as did the two potential "NWA" ones Adair and Delaware) the only significant "businesses" that seem to have opened there just across the line from FSM and NWA are ones related to gambling, and, unfortunately but predictably, gambling never has (apart from a place like Las Vegas) had a good record of being a community builder. Fascinating...Arkansas was always smaller, less populous and in the eyes of many far less "cultured" than Oklahoma or Missouri. 2. That being said, according to the Census Bureau:

Thanks, twin_number2. Interesting thing about that land is that a small tributary(?) of Sugar Creek runs through it, I believe. Can they divert it?

Cast your vote for "Greatest southern town" for Fayetteville or Bentonville if you wish: http://gardenandgun.com//article/southern-towns-bracket

Cast your vote for "Greatest southern town" for Fayetteville or Bentonville if you wish: http://gardenandgun.com//article/southern-towns-bracket

1. MAN, does that Centerton NHM look claustrophobia-inducing. I've never seen one of these stores so surrounded by homes and other structures. 2. Nice article on Bentonville in The City Wire (following on the heels of the AB article on Bennie this week). Regarding the words on the UAMS forum last week about this area being so philanthropic, according to the Rogers mayor:

One more thing...here's the address where "Thrive" will be built (on a current vacant lot right across the street from where the Bentonville Islamic Center had their house, don't know where they are now), but what's interesting is that ERC (building their new HQ in Chaffee Crossing) is developing it. Neat to see FSM investing in NWA, and vice versa with all the Walton family donations to the U.S. Marshals' Museum and the planned Riverwalk down there in "Smittyburg":

Going in where the "J" Street Muscle Maker Grill was.

Different one. As twin_number2 said, this is going in a few blocks south of the NHM building project as well. Man...a developer says we won't recognize Fort Smith in 5 years (at least east FSM). There's a big article today in AB as well about Conway and new developments off I-40 south of Dave Ward, and a developer says Conway will look totally different then. And it's clear that downtown Bentonville will have significant changes in the next half decade. Fascinating things happening in Arkansas' cities right now. Time to take a lot of "before" and "after" pictures...

Nice article in Arkansas Business today on downtown Bentonville, with a picture of the "Thrive" apartment complex scheduled to have ground broken the first week in April a few blocks south of the square. http://www.arkansasbusiness.com/article/97653/bentonville-stresses-its-small-town-feel:

That makes much more sense. A Supercenter was always talked about at that property east of First Baptist Church and Lifeway Christian School, and the NHM is farther east and closer to the Bentonville line. That new high school I posted renderings of above is going to be a magnet for development at this point in time.

Pictures of the new (second) Bentonville district high school from the public open house at Bentonville school headquarters tonight. The school is in a rought "L" shape. The image below is oriented with the top (under "SITE PLAN") being North. The "Gamble Road" view is from the east. The architect I spoke with said they're really trying to get traffic flowing east to west with this school, where the current traffic flow at the first Bentonville High School goes largely north to south (and vice versa):

Guess they're "Laughing" at anyone who thinks its not a Macadoodles.