Kite Realty nixes plan for movies-and-bowling venue in Carmel

Kite Realty Group Trust’s plan to develop a movies-and-bowling entertainment venue to help fill big vacancies at Hamilton Crossing Centre has fallen through.

In 2016 Kite was moving forward with plans to bring a Frank Theatres CineBowl & Grille to Hamilton Crossing, a Carmel retail development in the North Meridian corridor, east of U.S. 31 along Pennsylvania Street and Carmel Drive.

The venue, to have been operated by Jupiter, Florida-based Frank Entertainment Companies LLC, would have included 16 lanes of bowling, 10 movie screens, a video gaming area and a restaurant. Frank Entertainment operates three other CineBowl locations as well as 16 movie theaters and four bowling facilities, with properties in Florida, Georgia New Jersey, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia.
 
But Frank Entertainment now says it’s no longer planning to pursue the Hamilton Crossing project.

“With other upcoming projects in our pipeline, regretfully we could not devote the time and resources at this time for what should be a great project in Carmel,” Rob Reynolds of Frank Entertainment told IBJ in an e-mail.

Reynolds did not immediately respond to a follow-up question about when and why the project fell through. Kite officials also declined to talk with IBJ about the matter.

Now, Kite is left to come up with other ideas for Hamilton Crossing.

As recently as the first quarter of 2014, the development was 98 percent leased, according to Kite Realty public filings. 

But after anchor tenant Office Depot closed its store there, vacancies began to mount. Currently, more than half of the development’s 92,300 square feet are available for lease.

According to Kite’s February 2018 site plan for the property, 10 separate spaces are available for lease, the largest of which is the 30,700-square-foot anchor space. The other spaces range in size from 1,200 to 4,900 square feet. All told, the 10 spots represent 53,600 square feet of available space.

In its 2017 annual financial report, filed late last month, Kite describes Hamilton Crossing as a “redevelopment property,” where the company is working on “recapture of lease expiration, substantially enhancing merchandising mix and replacing vacant anchor tenant.”

Existing tenants in the development include Chase Bank, Max & Erma’s, Moe’s Southwest Grill, a Sports Clips hair salon, an optometry office and dental office, among others.