ADVERTISEMENT

    Is Downtown Ready for a New SPARC?

    ADVERTISEMENT

    Click here to jump back to PAGE 1.

    WE: People love the new Huntington Park and seem to treat it as more of a destination. Baseball fans can make more of a day out of their trip with other venues for food, drinks and entertainment near by. Do you see SPARC as being a destination for people that has the ability of spurring additional development around it?

    BS: Not only surrounding it, but on site. We’ll have a number of other businesses as well that will draw people down such as on-site restaurants. We’re trying to create a whole different bevy of activities on the site so that you’d come down, and you might come down for seven or eight hours. That’s an important element. Especially with auto-racing. People want to come down very early, they want to go down in the pits, they want to look at the cars, then watch the race and often they stay afterwards. As I said, we’re not looking to have a whole slew of these races. But when we do it, we think that there’s a good opportunity to pull people down. We need to get people out of their homes in the suburbs, and get them down here, and spend some money, and that will have the greatest impact.

    The other thing that I can tell you is that we’ve met with a number of people in the auto-racing business and one of the things that they’ve said is that they see this as the new paradigm. They think that the days of the 2.5 mile super speedways and the 100k-120k stands are over. Maybe we’re going through a cycle and maybe it will come back in 10 to 15 years, but they see this type of intimate facility being the norm going forward. We’re happy that we’re on that cusp. I’d rather be on the cusp going forward than be on the inside, going down. In effect, that’s what happened with the mall. We created City Center based on the paradigm for the past. At one point that mall was absolutely phenomenal, but we all saw how quickly it went out of favor. It was because we were on the back side of the curve. The flip side of it was Easton, which was on the front side of the curve.

    WE: What drew you to this very urban and central location for a project like this?

    BS: Well, realistically, had it not been urban, and had it not been on I-70 with 140,000 vehicles a day that go by the site, we wouldn’t have been interested. If you use ODOT’s calculations, the site gets around a hundred million impressions a year. There’s almost nowhere else where we could get that amount of visibility, so that was critical. The urban nature of it is also critical because that is really the new paradigm. Historically, race tracks are always built out in the middle of nowhere. Part of the reason today that they were built in the middle of nowhere is because everyone wanted to acquire more and more acreage to do things around the track. You needed 600, 800 or 1,000 acres to do something like this. Obviously, you are not going to get that in an urban site. Here, we have close to 2 million people in a 25 mile radius of the site. That’s a very different situation than building it forty miles outside of town and hoping you can get people to come out for it. And because we are more activity-driven than race-driven, it’s important that we have the population around us. Mid-Ohio is a great facility, but it’s a hike to get there.

    We have a lot of so-called motorheads in this city. When you look at where they can go to really satisfy their needs, it’s up to Michigan, over to Indianapolis, over to Western Pennsylvania, or down to Kentucky. There’s not much for them in this state.

    Another group we want to appeal to is the specific autoclubs, like the BMW club, Ferrari club and the Porsche club. They have annual or regional meetings and we have a good opportunity to bring them here because our site is within 500 miles of half of the US population. A lot of times these groups will host their events at a major hotel and they’ll have a large parking lot but won’t have something like a track, or an autocross course, that they can take advantage of and make it more of an exciting experience for the participants.

    WE: So what is the current timeline of the project?

    BS: To tell you the truth, we’re just going to work it the way we have to work it. There’s about five projects in one here. Certain aspects will open sooner than other aspects. We’re hoping to have virtually everything open in 2014. So roughly two years. It may take a little longer. That could be impacted by the economy, so it depends on what happens.

    WE: Thanks a bunch for taking the time today to update us on this project, Bill.

    BS: My pleasure.

    More information can be found online at www.sparcohio.com.

    ADVERTISEMENT

    Subscribe

    More to Explore:

    11th Annual Urban Living Tour Returns on Sunday, May 5th

    Looking for a new place to live? Want to see what living in the city could be like? The Urban Living Tour is a self-guided open house of apartments, condos, and homes in the Columbus area. You'll see an assortment of new builds, remodels, apartment communities, parks, and all the amenities that go with city living!

    CCAD Wants to Uncover Historic Building, Fill in Parking Lot

    The Columbus College of Art & Design has submitted...

    Intel Gets More Federal Funding for Ohio Production Plants

    Nearly $20 billion in federal grants and loans is on its way to Intel to support work on semiconductor fabs in Ohio and around the country. The funding is part of the CHIPS Act, signed into law by President Joe Biden in 2022. Ohio’s New Albany-area Intel facility currently under construction stands to benefit substantially.

    Updated: Madison County Solar Farm Would Be One of the Largest in U.S.

    UPDATE (3/21/24): The Ohio Power Siting Board voted seven...
    Walker Evans
    Walker Evanshttps://columbusunderground.com
    Walker Evans is the co-founder of Columbus Underground, along with his wife and business partner Anne Evans. Walker has turned local media into a full time career over the past decade and serves on multiple boards and committees throughout the community.
    ADVERTISEMENT