Calling all developers: Phoenix has empty buildings to spare, and we’re looking for a few good minds to do something bold, beautiful and unexpected with them. Big chains need not apply.

As towering construction cranes attempt to etch out a new skyline with the $900 million dollar CityScape project Downtown, a smaller, humbler endeavor is launching in a former Mervyns on a ramshackle corner in central Mesa, attempting to breathe life into just one of hundreds of empty big-box stores across the Valley.

The building has been stripped of all signs of its former life as a department store. The once bland, beige interior is clean and stark, gleaming with bright white walls and smooth, stained concrete floors. Exposed ductwork adds an industrial edge – a look better suited to a Downtown art gallery or chic Scottsdale restaurant perhaps. But this is Stapley Drive and Main Street – not the most attractive block in the Valley – and neither Phoenix nor Scottsdale can claim what’s about to go down inside these walls.

Photo by Nicole Roegner This is POOL, a conglomeration of local vendors who gather daily to sell their wares. By September 60 vendors should have filled the space in time for the grand opening. Like a gussied-up flea market for the modern set, POOL houses jewelers, clothing boutiques, a farmers’ market, a florist, a coffee bar and an empanada maker, among others.

This is POOL, a conglomeration of local vendors who gather daily to sell their wares. On a muggy morning in July, nearly 40 vendors set up shop for the first time; by September 60 vendors should have filled the space in time for the grand opening. Like a gussied-up flea market for the modern set, POOL houses jewelers, clothing boutiques, a farmers’ market, a florist, a coffee bar and an empanada maker, among others. It’s not the big, fancy shot in the arm that the upcoming CityScape is striving to be for Downtown Phoenix, but its co-founders are betting on POOL being a mini panacea for Mesa’s struggling commercial sector.

“We’re trying to be a real business incubator, creating a real merchant class in an area that needs economic stimulation, in an area that needs entertainment and vitality,” says COO and co-founder of POOL Skyler Hynes, who, along with CEO Brad Weinstock, created the multi-vendor concept when the building’s owner needed to do something with the dying Mervyns she had invested in. It took $3 million in renovations to turn the lackluster Mervyns into POOL.

Best of all, POOL is reusing part of our existing landscape, filling in at least one hole of the Valley’s retail real estate map that’s quickly resembling a block of Swiss cheese. CB Richard Ellis Group Inc., the world’s largest commercial real estate brokerage, reported yet another rise in vacancies in the Phoenix retail market at the end of June to 12.2 percent, up from 11 percent at the end of the first quarter. The report also revealed more than 8.3 million square feet of empty big-box space in the Phoenix-metro area at the end of the second quarter, compared with 3.9 million square feet at the end of 2007.

Rather than fill their vacancy with something tired and predictable, Hynes and Weinstock brought something that Mesa shoppers are in dire need of, and something other developers should bring to the table – ingenuity. The building’s owner could have put a dollar store into the empty Mervyns, Hynes says, but knowing those were a dime a dozen in Mesa, she opted for an out-of-the-big-box idea, and we’re hoping it paves the way for other vacant spaces.

If only all of our empty buildings – whether big-box blights or historic, neglected gems – could be resuscitated with lively new ideas. Hynes points out, in fact, that some of the country’s best community attractions – Faneuil Hall in Boston, Pike Place Market in Seattle – were dilapidated, down-for-the-count shells of buildings before someone brought them back to life. It’s called adaptive reuse – retooling old structures into something other than their original purpose – and we’re smitten.

Granted, it’s not a new idea, but it’s one our officials should keep at the top of their lists as new projects hit their desks promising to be the next saviors of the city.

We’ve seen some great examples of adaptive reuse in Phoenix in the past several years already: The former Monroe School on Seventh Street is now the Children’s Museum of Phoenix; Steve and Andi Rosenstein turned a 1928 brick warehouse on Central Avenue and Lincoln into The Duce, a one-stop restaurant, lounge, bar, old-school gym and vintage bike shop; an old gas station on Indian School Road and Seventh Avenue is now the ultra cool Copper Star Coffee; a collection of World War II Japanese internment houses along Grand Avenue now hosts a handful of independent boutiques on a quirky block called Paisley Town; the old Bayless Grocery and Market on Seventh Street just south of Roosevelt Street welcomed the hip, new creative co-working space called CO+HOOTS this summer; and the recently shuttered Circles music shop on Central Avenue and McKinley Street could see the Arizona Opera as its next tenant, pending city approval.

It’s more of these ideas – instead of the new, massive, multi-million dollar entertainment meccas – we’d love to see sprinkled throughout the city, and we’re not alone.

“In the Great Recession, architects, contractors and developers are hurting,” says Jim McPherson, Arizona Heritage Alliance and Arizona Preservation Foundation board member, and grand award recipient of the 2010 Governor’s Heritage Preservation Honor Awards in May. “It’s time to get creative. It’s time to think small and doable. It’s time to stretch, professionally, outside one’s comfort zone. It’s time to build community, not towers.”

McPherson has a laundry list of old buildings he’d like to see turned into something creative. It’s beneficial not only to the community, he says, but to the environment.

“Adaptive reuse is the ultimate form of sustainability,” McPherson says. “Original resources and energy are retained. Fewer construction materials and labor are used. Energy consumption is reduced. And less waste ends up in our landfills.”

He’s not the only one singing the adaptive reuse refrain these days. Local architect Taz Loomins blogs often and insightfully about sustainability and preservation at bloomingrock.com. Niels Kriepke is a developer who McPherson says “gets it.” His firm, Desert Viking, is responsible for some notable adaptive reuse projects in Phoenix already (Goldspot Market and Sun Dee), and he’s currently working to revamp the building on the southeast corner of Seventh Avenue and McDowell Road. Phoenix Development Services Director Mark Leonard and Executive Director of Local First Arizona Kimber Lanning were instrumental in shaping the city’s Adaptive Reuse Task Force, which began as a pilot program in 2008 to simplify the process of modifying old buildings and has grown into what McPherson says may be one of the best programs in the country from a policy standpoint.

Adaptive reuse isn’t a phenomenon specific to Arizona, either. In her book Big Box Reuse (MIT Press, 2008), Julia Christensen explores how communities across America are turning empty Wal-Marts and Home Depots into community centers, schools and churches. In one hilariously creative case, a K-Mart in Austin, Minnesota, became The Spam Museum.

Don’t get us wrong; we’re eager to see how CityScape and the three blocks’ worth of retail and restaurants it will bring to Downtown pans out. (The opening of a CVS store at CityScape in July marked Downtown’s first pharmacy in more than 30 years, warranting a big, fat “finally!”) But if the hope of once and for all giving people a reason to stay and play in Phoenix doesn’t come to fruition, it’ll be a near-billion-dollar blunder and another waste of a prime Downtown space (we’re looking at you, Arizona Center).

Besides, the economic benefit of reusing existing buildings is a no-brainer.

“The mere fact that we’ve got so much square footage on the market drives the rental price down on these types of buildings well below what a new building would have to pay, and it opens [the marketplace] up to businesses that could not even gain entry,” says John Rehling, a senior vice president with CBRE and an expert on retail trends in Arizona and the Southwest. Lease rates in the Valley took a hit by the end of the second quarter, according to CBRE, having fallen 8.2 percent from the end of 2009 to an average net price of $15.95 per square foot.

Economics aside, where and what to develop still comes down to where we, the consumers, want to spend our days – and our cash. Kevin Shuck, another senior vice president with CBRE, says it’s a concept like POOL that could prove more successful in the current recession for one simple reason: “It’s fun to discover something new and unique,” he says, “and what’s even more fun about that is telling friends. It’s that sense of ‘I know something you don’t know.’”