New owner for The Mill
By D.J. Smith / Staff Writer / djsmith@nlrtimes.com
Friday, April 11, 2008 2:55 PM CDT
The Mill at 1234 E. Fifth St. owned by the Cameron family for more than 80 years — the tallest structure downtown — became the property of the New Argenta Development Group last week.
Tuesday night Paul Esterer said that after about a year of negotiations with the Mountaire Corp., which the Cameron family owns, the money had been transferred early last week.
The price for the Mill was $1,875,000, with an additional $900,000 for Mountaire’s office building, which was leased back to the firm, he said.
Senior Vice President Dee Ann Landreth said she and a few others in management will remain in that office building. The company decided to keep its headquarters in North Little Rock to oversee its poultry production facilities in Selbyville and Millsboro, Del., and Lumber Bridge, N.C., after production ended in November.
Whether it was called the Cameron Feed Mill, Prime Feeds or simply The Mill, a piece of North Little Rock history that employed countless workers over the years will disappear from view over the next six months, Esterer said.
“We’re analyzing it every day, but we’ll bring the entire structure down,” Esterer said. “It’s a difficult assignment to clean up and demolish the site to prepare it for a long-term development plan, which we are working on as we speak.”
Prices for the deconstruction of the building are coming in and being investigated, he said, but the site has components unique to Esterer’s 15 years in the development field, he said. Eighty years doesn’t come down in a day.
Unlike with the relatively cut and dried removal of the single-story commercial buildings on Maple Street to make way for the 57 town homes of the development group’s City Grove project, the sheer size of the mill comes into play.
He said removal of the massive concrete and steel members of the building calls for careful attention to minimize the impact to nearby buildings.
First and foremost, he said, will be the proper disposal of the materials to ensure that the demolition is done with environmentally conscientious practices.
Residents who said they liked the smell coming from the mill should go there and get a final “whiff” soon because, he said, “our No. 1 job is to get rid of the smell.”
The iconic nature of the roughly 4-acre plot isn’t lost on him or his New Argenta Development Group partners, who include John Gaudin and Harold Tenenbaum, he said.
“It’s a symbol of the city’s historic industrial area,” he said. “Our goal is to build a really special community that responds to what the neighbors, the state and the region wants.”
The partners have tentatively chosen the subsidiary name The Mill LLC for the project, he said. The Mill District is the working name for the mixed-use buildings to be built on the property, he added.
While having different backgrounds for their principal businesses, the partners bring “different skill sets” when they take on such collaborative projects as the New Argenta Development Group, he said.
The planning for the mill property was discussed extensively during the year the deal was negotiated, Esterer explained.
The second phase will be the demolition and site preparation, and the third will be the build-out of the land, which is evolving constantly as new ideas are brought out.
“The Mill District will just be a district within the overall master plan for North Little Rock, and we’re just trying to fill the vision of the city leaders and other people who have come before,” he said.
With such lofty plans, it begged the question of whether the team was up to the task, and, more importantly, to the expense of such a daunting proposition.
“We believe we are leaving a legacy for the community,” he said, “that we have a responsibility that every brick we put back in, every plant that we replant, we take extreme care, so that’s the goal.”
Esterer said the partners feel it is the right decision at the right time and want to thank those who helped them become the group that bought the property.
He hopes the city’s residents are as excited as he and his partners to keep track of the progress as the group presents plans for the project as they develop.
The partners are “playing around with” ideas and logos for the project that can be viewed at www.argentamilldistrict.com, but Esterer said these are not etched in stone.
