Kinetix Health Club moving to downtown location.

Kinetix Health Club moving to downtown location.By late summer, people should be running on treadmills and lifting weights in a downtown Macon building where more than 50 years ago Maconites used to shop for clothing, shoes and household goods.

Kinetix Health Club will move into a large portion of the commercial space available in the historic Dannenberg building in downtown Macon. Nearly 70 lofts are being built throughout the structure.

The announcement was made Tuesday morning in front of what is now Dannenberg Lofts, formerly one of the largest department stores in the Southeast. The gym will occupy about 6,500 square feet on two floors in the corner commercial space at Popular and Third streets.

“Today is a momentous occasion for us as owners,” Gene Dunwody Sr. said before turning the microphone over to his son, Gene Dunwody Jr. The Dunwodys are part of the owner-development team for the project.

http://www.macon.com/2013/04/02/2421399/health-club-to-move-into-the-former.html

“I am real excited about today,” said Dunwody Jr., who negotiated the lease. “It’s been a long time coming. … It’s a challenge to find retail and street-level tenants to come into this urban area and to have the vision it takes to be able to see … what can actually be downtown.”

This will be the eighth Kinetix fitness center in Middle Georgia, said licensed owner Mark Cullars.

“This should be our most exciting gym because it’s in a downtown,” Cullars said. “It’s a little edgier. … This should be the coolest club I’ve ever built.”

Cardio equipment and personal trainers will be on the street level with the free-weights area downstairs, he said. The gym would be open initially 5 a.m. to 10 p.m. with a staff person on-site.

Two remaining street-level commercial spaces with about 1,400 square feet and about 3,200 square feet have not been leased yet, Dunwody Jr. said. Kinetix signed a 10-year lease.

Renovation of the 80,000-square-foot, four-story Dannenberg Lofts began last year, turning the vacant building into 68 modern-day lofts and three commercial spaces. Lizella-based ECI Construction Group began work on the building in August 2012.

Phase one, which includes 24 lofts, is near completion and should be released by June, Dunwody said. The building will include 600-square-foot studio units up to 1,600-square-foot three-bedroom units, and monthly rents will range from about $525 up to $1,400. The management company handling leasing is Atlanta-based Provence Real Estate and a manager is expected to begin leasing units next week, he said.

One membership to Kinetix will be included in the rent of a unit.

From the front of the building on Third Street, a large atrium in the center is lit by large skylights, similar to the style of Broadway Lofts on Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.

On one of the upper levels, a walking bridge connects to the Poplar Street parking garage.

Another developer on the project, Tony Long, said many of the former department store’s features, such as art deco light fixtures, were saved and will be used in the building.

Long said he was careful to save two, two-level display cases in the front of the building. He plans to fill them with some of the artifacts from the store, such as an original cash register. Also, a pair of women’s shoes discovered a few weeks ago underneath the wooden floor would be displayed in the case. On the second level of the display case, Long hopes to showcase some vintage clothing.

Photographs of the original building will be used throughout the space.

“This was actually four separate buildings,” Long said. “One was built in 1894, one in 1895, one in 1903 — where Kinetix will go — and the Poplar Street end of the building was built in 1913.”

He said when he came to the department store as a child, he didn’t know — and was certain his parents didn’t know — it was actually four different buildings connected to make one.

The Dannenberg has been called the “keystone project” of NewTown Macon’s Phase III downtown revitalization plan, which looks at transforming the area block by block.

A NewTown study last year estimated that 235 residential units could be developed in downtown Macon for each of the next five years, and that number still wouldn’t keep up with demand.

To contact writer Linda S. Morris, call 744-4223. Information from Telegraph archives was used in this report.