TGIFriday-1

The Kalamazoo TGI Fridays restaurant sits closed on Thursday, May 25, 2017, on West Main Street at U.S. 131. Its location is soon to become part of Westgate, a $100 million, mixed-use development that will use about 140 acres there by the highway.

(JakeGreen/MLive.com)

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KALAMAZOO, MI -- The TGI Fridays restaurant on West Main Street at U.S. 131 has closed for business.

Plans call for its 11,000-square-foot location at 5650 W. Main St., which has been a restaurant/tavern since the mid-1970s, to be demolished in coming weeks to make way for Westgate, a $100 million, mixed-use development that will use about 140 acres there by the highway.

TGI Fridays, which was a location for Carlos Murphy's Cafe & Bar when the property was first developed in the mid-1970s, sits on about 3 acres of land adjacent to West Main Street in Oshtemo Township.

Joseph Gesmundo, a principal with property developer AVB Inc., said a long-term lease that Fridays has on the property expires at the end of this month and a new lease has not been entered.

Fridays sits on land on which AVB plans to build four new restaurants as part of the Westgate project (which was originally called The Gateway). Asked if a new version of Fridays may be one of the four new eateries, Gesmundo said that has not been negotiated.

Beyond the restaurants, going north along U.S. 131, AVB's plans call for the construction of three hotels. The first two are to be new incarnations of Holiday Inn & Suites and Holiday Inn Express.

The Holiday Inn at 2747 S. 11th St. (located south of Stadium Drive) is soon to become a Delta Hotel by Marriott. The Holiday Inn & Suites hotel brand will be re-established at Westgate. The Holiday Inn Express at Westgate will be the second of the InterContinental Hotel Group's limited-service, business-focused hotels in the Greater Kalamazoo area. There is another Holiday Inn Express at 3630 E. Cork St.

Work on the first of those hotels is to begin this spring. Work on the second is to begin in 2018. Work on the third hotel, which has not yet been named but is expected to be an extended stay inn, is not expected until 2019.

The first portion of the Westgate property has U.S. 131 on its west and the Maple Hill Auto Group, along with two residential complexes (Summer Ridge Apartments and Evergreen North Apartments) to its immediate east.

Of TGI Fridays, Gesmundo said, "Their lease is up and we're developing Westgate. That development includes site balancing and rerouting of the roadway that comes in there. ... We needed to have it (Fridays) closed so we could tear it down and do site balancing."

Site balancing refers to evening out and flattening the terrain, which has some hills and some gullies. Gesmundo said some of the dirt from the land where the hotels are to be build will be moved to the area where the restaurants will be built in order to level it.

The area where Fridays is now, will ultimately be 8 to 9 feet higher than it is now, he said.

In regard to the restaurants, Gesmundo said, "We don't technically have people that are signed yet. So I can't give you a date (for the first of them to be developed and opened). But hopefully that would happen within the next 12 months."

He said they will most likely be restaurants that are known nationwide..

"Ideally it would be restaurants that are new the market," he said. "But they may be national restaurants that have a location in some other part of Greater Kalamazoo and are simply new to the west side of town.