The Pearl is about to get a new neighbor and what that looks like is finally coming into focus.
The owners of a plot of land on Broadway Street, long vacant in one of San Antonio’s fastest-growing corridors, revealed their plans recently for a required review by the city’s Historic and Design Review Commission (HDRC).
Renderings show a dense 3.4-acre shopping mecca of luxury brands that the developers are calling Broadway East San Antonio (BESA), a counterpart to the dining-centric development at the former brewery.
“Silver Ventures has developed a fantastic project for the city and done an excellent job of curating local retail and restaurants for the Pearl,” said Benjamin Dreszer, president and partner of Fulcrum Development. “Because of the overall success of their project and the impact it has had on the city, national and regional tenants would like to be as close to the Pearl as possible.”
The project would be built on a block of individual parcels bounded by Broadway Street to the west, Casa Blanca Street to the south, North Alamo Street to the east and the 1800 Broadway apartments to the north, according to the package prepared for HDRC.
The parcel is owned by Besa Land Partners, a foreign limited liability company registered by San Antonio-based real estate developers, Fulcrum Development.
GrayStreet Partners is listed among the partners working on the project. The firm’s general manager Kevin Covey did not respond to a request for comment.
GrayStreet had once planned to build a 23-acre mixed-use community at the site before putting the land back on the market in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. The firm then sold much of the land to Fulcrum.
Dreszer attributed other delays to inflation, high interest rates and environmental clean-up from the prior uses of the land.
Documents submitted by the partnership to the Office of Historic Preservation for conceptual approval by HDRC on Jan. 15 propose multi-level buildings with sharply angled roof pitches and storefront windows in a sprawling shopping center.
Pearl Parkway is extended east from the Pearl, through Broadway Street to North Alamo Street, according to the renderings.
In addition, the plans show one fire-damaged house on the site facing North Alamo Street is slated for deconstruction and removal, and another relocated with approval.
But the ornate facade of a former commercial building, still standing as a remnant of Broadway’s pre-suburbia heyday, will be incorporated into the development.
Among Fulcrum’s other local projects are the Alon Town Centre, 10003 Northwest Military Hwy., developed in 2010 and the 60-acre Culebra Commons on the Far West Side in 2021.
Renderings for BESA by design architects Kohn Pederson Fox of New York City and architect of record Ford Powell Carson of San Antonio show a large parcel behind BESA being used for parking until a future phase of the project is developed.
The building design schemes appear to take their cues from a color and materials palette at the Pearl, where restaurants dominate the mix of uses in a walkable campus that’s drawn booming residential development to Tobin Hill.
But the proposed Broadway East, located on the edge of the Government Hill neighborhood, is marked for mostly retail, though not in an average strip-center sort of way.
Stores could include luxury home furnishings, high-end fashion stores such as Gucci, Peter Millar and Rolex, wellness and beauty the likes of Chanel, and upmarket heritage brands like Lucchese and Ralph Lauren, according to a sales brochure.
“Broadway East provides those tenants the opportunity to literally be at the Pearl’s front door,” Dreszer said.
The first phase of the project will feature 175,000 square feet of retail space, according to the brochure, and the second phase will feature mixed-use spaces, including office, retail, hospitality and additional retail.
Dreszer said he expects the project to be completed in less than two years from the start of construction and the first retail tenants to open their doors in late 2027.
The BESA property is situated inside of an area designated River Improvement Overlay (RIO)-2, which extends from Highway 281 North to Lexington Avenue in downtown San Antonio.
In August 2022, the owners sought and obtained from the city a RIO Development Node Zoning Overlay on the property.
The development node allows the developer to design buildings with no setbacks from all property lines and exceed the building height from 10 stories to 15.
Other development nodes in the area include the eight-story Oxbow office building developed by Silver Ventures and a 12-story tower that serves as Credit Human headquarters.
Another development node in the vicinity, approved in 2018, sits just south of those properties at 1611 Broadway, and is where GrayStreet had once touted plans to build a 20-story hotel tower.
In 2020, GrayStreet completed its $47 million renovation of the former San Antonio Light newspaper building at 420 Broadway St. into mixed-use office and retail space.