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SOUTHWESTERN ILLINOIS
IS EMERGING AS ONE OF THE NATION'S TOP DISTRIBUTION CENTERS.
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By William
Poe
If the Gateway Arch symbolizes the westward thrust of people and
goods in the 19th Century, the Gateway Commerce Center is the manifestation
of distribution of a different sort in the 21st Century.
“The whole notion of distribution has long been part of the history
of the metropolitan area,” says Jim Pennekamp, executive director
of the Leadership Council Southwestern Illinois. “Our location at
the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers was largely
responsible for our initial growth, and now it’s our interstate
highway connections in the heart of the country that are fueling
our growth as a major distribution center.”
Pennekamp sees the Gateway Commerce Center, located nearly in the
shadow of the Arch in Madison County, Ill. as its own sleek and
glimmering symbol of the growth of distribution in southwestern
Illinois.
The centerpiece of the 2,300-acre Gateway Commerce Center is the
sprawling 1.3 million-square-foot Unilever warehouse, which is even
larger than the 933,000-square-foot Metropolitan Square office building
in downtown St. Louis and is the largest single-user distribution
center in the region. Inside the warehouse are seemingly endless
rows upon rows of Hellman’s mayonnaise, Lipton tea, Knorr soups,
Dove and Lux soaps, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, and Close-Up toothpaste—to
name but a few of the nearly 400 Unilever consumer brands that are
stocked in the facility before being shipped around the country.
As the largest Unilever warehouse in the U.S., the Madison County
facility, says Pennekamp, is “an incredible indicator of the real
opportunities that are emerging here.”
"THE
NATION'S FOREMOST LOGISTICS CONSULTING COMPANY HAS
DECLARED GATEWAY AS POTENTIALLY ONE OF THE TOP TRANSPORTATION
AND DISTRIBUTION HUBS IN NORTH AMERICA."
Mike Towerman
:president
TRISTAR Business Communities
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In fact, Mike Towerman, president of TRiSTAR Business Communities
which is developing Gateway Commerce Center, says that the nation’s
foremost logistics consulting company has declared Gateway as potentially
one of the top transportation and distribution hubs in North America.
“Obviously, we think they’re right,” says Towerman, who for more
than seven years has been directing Gateway, itself twice as large
as the Earth City project across the river in St. Louis County.
Also apparently in agreement are Hershey Foods Corporation, which
this summer will open its 1.1 million-square-foot midwestern distribution
center at Gateway; Dial Corporation, which has a 812,000-square-foot
facility there; Procter & Gamble; SuperValu; Cadbury Schweppes,
the world’s third-largest soft drink producer; New World Pasta;
Lanter Company, a refrigerated trucking and warehousing company
which built three new warehouses offering 500,000 square feet of
space, and others, says Towerman. All told, Gateway, located at
the intersection of I-270 and I-255, now has six million square
feet under roof. That represents about $180 million in direct building
investment, estimates Towerman.
Attracting tenants is a winning combination of central location,
easy access to north-south and east-west interstates, and a large
and flat expanse of reasonably priced vacant land that Towerman
says just can’t be found in many other places anywhere else in the
midwest.
To Pennekamp, Gateway is the most visible, but not the only, example
of a shift in the metro-east from a reliance on manufacturing to
services as the area’s economic engine and jobs producer.
“There are well over 1,000 jobs at Gateway Commerce Center,” says
Pennekamp. “That is significant because many of those are new jobs.”
The Illinois Department of Employment Security has statistics showing
that Madison and St. Clair counties are in the midst of a 37-year
trend away from manufacturing jobs in favor of more service jobs.
Up the road a piece from Gateway is perhaps the best example of
that shift. In Alton at the foot of the magnificent Clark Bridge
across the Mississippi is the new Alton Center Business Park, now
rising like a phoenix from the ashes of the old Owens-Illinois Inc.
glass plant. There, Clark Properties is rapidly replacing back-breaking
industrial jobs with easy-living service-sector jobs. The business
park’s biggest tenant is the American Water Works Company, the nation’s
largest private water company, which now employs more than 500 people
in its new national service and call center. The company now occupies
approximately 43,000 square feet of space and is looking to add
another 15,000 square feet, says Mike Clark, president of the development
company.
Clark, whose company purchased the property in May, 2000, says he
now has 410,000 square feet under roof and is primed to add other
office/back office/service center/light assembly/warehousing tenants
to remaining commercial portions of the tract, plus retail and hospitality
providers along a section that fronts Alton’s major thoroughfare,
Broadway.
“It’s a great location coming off the new bridge,” says Clark, a
leading authority in the adaptive re-use of fallow industrial sites.
“This is a great opportunity to grow Alton.”
Also poised for growth, says Pennekamp, is Tri-City Regional Port
District. Tri-City, which operates a harbor on the Chain of Rocks
Canal near Granite City, plans to invest between $15 million and
$18 million in public and private money in a new harbor south of
Locks and Dam 27 and a total of $50 million on the harbor, plus
a new intermodal freight facility, warehouses and material handling
systems on the grounds of the former U.S. Army Charles Melvin Price
Support Center. Tri-City would retain 152 units of housing, a golf
course, a day care center and a couple of office buildings and incorporate
all of this into the Mid-America River Transportation Park. Officials
estimate that the expanded facility would create 1,000 new jobs
and greatly increase the freight tonnage moving through the port.
Tri-City, along with the Gateway Commerce Center and MidAmerica
Airport, were just last year added to the Foreign Trade Zone #31
in Illinois. That move, Towerman and Pennekamp agree, should help
grow southwestern Illinois as a distribution hub.
“A large percentage of imported products go to the midwest anyway,”
says Pennekamp. “With our foreign trade zone, there is no need to
open a crate on the east coast. It can be shipped directly to Gateway
Commerce Center, the port or MidAmerica airport and then shipped
from here at significant cost savings. We are clearly emerging as
a national- or international-class distribution center.”
William V. Poe is principal of Poe Communications, a St. Louis
advertising and marketing communications firm.
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