Twickenham Square construction

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(Gallery by Steve Doyle | sdoyle@al.com)

HUNTSVILLE, Alabama - The first pieces of the $100 million Twickenham Square mixed-use development in Huntsville's medical district are expected to open in very early 2014.

Tom Hunt, whose PHD Hotels is developing a 101-room Homewood Suites along Gallatin Street, said workers are busy framing in the third floor.

"Progress is great there," Hunt said earlier this week. "We're on track to open hopefully sometime in January."

Ditto for the first wave of 246 loft apartments being built by Bristol Development Group of Brentwood, Tenn. Bristol executive Sam Yeager said he expects tenants to start moving into the recently-renamed Artisan apartments in January or February. The original name was The Flats at Twickenham Square.

Yeager said potential tenants "have been calling" but leases won't be available until construction is farther along.

"We obviously got impacted by the rains," Yeager said Wednesday, "but everyone is pitching in to try to make up for what Mother Nature dealt us."

A architect's rendering of Twickenham Square. (Courtesy Bristol Development and PGM Properties)

Work is also progressing on Triad Properties' five-story, $36 million medical office tower at the northwest corner of Gallatin Street and St. Clair Avenue. Triad executive William Stroud said crews recently poured 77 concrete support columns for the Twickenham Place tower.

Stroud said passersby should see the building's steel skeleton begin to emerge from the ground in about six weeks. A climate-controlled pedestrian bridge will connect the third floor of the tower to Huntsville Hospital's main public parking garage.

Gerry Shannon, another Triad executive, said Huntsville Hospital will be part-owner of the building and plans to relocate its clinical laboratory there. The lab will cover the entire third floor and half of the fourth floor - about 35,000 square feet in all.

Shannon said a large Huntsville medical practice has agreed to take over most of the fifth floor and will also be part-owner of the tower. The name of the practice will be announced later, he said.

"We've got a couple of non-medical tenants looking at the ground floor, but nothing signed yet," Shannon said Thursday. "The preference has always been to have a bank there, and maybe a small sandwich shop or something like that."

The goal is to have a certificate of occupancy from the city by mid-February so the hospital lab and others can move into the tower in early March, he said.

The things that local shoppers and diners are most excited about - a new Publix supermarket, four new restaurants and other retail stores - will come last.

Yeager said retailers don't want to move to Twickenham Square until the roads and other heavy construction is finished in mid- to late-spring 2014.

"We have a lot of (retailers) that want to be there, and they're willing to pay rents that were not in that market before because there wasn't the product there," said Yeager. "But they don't want to open in a construction zone."

He said Bristol and its development partner, PGM Properties, have signed "one or two" leases for restaurant and retail space but are not ready to name the businesses.

"We want to make sure we've got the right mix," said Yeager.

Twickenhenham Square is taking over the former Councill Courts public house site. Bristol, PGM and Triad paid the Huntsville Housing Authority just over $5 million for the 11.7-acre property.

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