As the final stage of the redevelopment of Busy Street in Richmond, Va., the Courthouse Place shops provide much needed retail space to the area adjacent to Chesterfield Town Center Mall. The shops include two main anchor tenants (Dunkin Donuts and Shackelford’s Seafood Restaurant), as well as smaller retail space for non-chain tenants. Balzer & Associates provided site engineering, transportation engineering, and construction management services, in addition to coordination with the project architect and structural engineers.
With such a long and narrow site, designing a retail building with full traffic circulation around the structure proved challenging. “In addition,” explains Project Manager Christopher Shust, “the narrowness of the site made it difficult to ensure the proper parking distributions were met across the various tenant spaces in the building.”
The shape of the site was not the only obstacle; the site was also unable to accommodate a gravity sewer, despite the fact that it is located in the midst of a larger commercial development. As a result, the design and construction of a sewer pump station was required. In order to make the pump station cost effective for the development, an agreement was made for an adjacent retail building to share in the design and construction costs.
Balzer had to address a major drainage channel that transected the site and served as the primary drainage outfall for a larger commercial shopping center. In order to develop the Courthouse Place shops, the channel was relocated along the perimeter of the site and a concrete channel was designed to meet the conveyance requirements for the upstream drainage areas.
Area residents are quite pleased with the high architectural standard that has been maintained while providing the desired retail space. With the addition of the new Courthouse Place shops, two vacant and overgrown residences were replaced with an attractive, pedestrian scale retail development.
