Lowe's-anchored center taps growing Highway 36 traffic
Staff Writer REJournals.com
long overshadowed by its much better known Washington County neighbor Stillwater, Oak Park Heights is becoming a hotbed of development activity, especially on its northern border along Highway 36.
Recently the suburb has played host to the building of Boutwell's Landing, a massive, 590-unit senior housing development headed by Presbyterian Homes. And on the retail side, the 159,000 square foot first phase of the Shoppes of Oak Park Heights, owned by Principal Real Estate Investors, opened in late 2004 at Highway 36 and Norrell Avenue North.
Now add CSM Corp.'s new project, Oak Park Commons, to Oak Park Heights' activity list. The development, which is set to break ground this spring, will be anchored by a Lowe's home improvement store and will also include 30,000 square feet of additional retail space, according to John Gelderman, CSM's director of retail development.
He says the development action along the Highway 36 strip between Highway 5 on the west and the St. Croix River on the east has shifted to the Oak Park Heights (south) side of the highway, since most of the land on the Stillwater side has already been developed.
"What we're doing with Oak Park Commons working with the last front-and-center location along that retail strip," Gelderman says. "There's been a lot of interest in the smaller retail space we'll have there."
The site is near the intersection of Highway 36 and Oakgreen Avenue North. Nearby is the Oak Park Heights Wal-Mart store, which will also be the scene of development this year: the Arkansas-based retailer is set to expand that facility into a superstore.
The CSM site is on a parcel that became available when the Minnesota Department of Transportation decided against building a full cloverleaf intersection there and instead merely improve the existing at-grade intersection as part of its plans to build a new bridge from Highway 36 across the St. Croix River into Wisconsin.
The planning process for the river crossing has progressed to the visual impact stage, where stakeholders from both sides of the Minnesota-Wisconsin border are discussing what it should look like.
