Subway signs as initial tenant of St. Martin Airport Plaza

Subway will be the initial tenant of the first retail building in St. Martin Airport Plaza, a 36-acre business park near The Eastern Iowa Airport in southwest Cedar Rapids.

Tom Slattery Sr., senior partner of Heritage Associates Corp., said he is interviewing additional tenants for the remainder of the 10,000-square-foot building. Occupancy is planned before November.

St. Martin Airport Plaza, off Sixth Street SW near Interstate 380 and Wright Brothers Boulevard SW, will have 14 lots with buildings providing flexible space for office, retail, warehouse/distribution and service industries, Slattery said .

"We have plans to construct several additional buildings as soon as the economy gets moving," Slattery said. "We're constructing quality buildings, we want quality tenants and we're going to wait for them."

Access to the business park is off Sixth Street SW by a single loop drive, St. Martin Boulevard SW.

Rinderknecht Associates is the general contractor, and David Brost Jr. of Brost Architects & Planners is the architect for the project. Additional information is available at www.airport-plaza.com.

St. Martin Land Co., which bought the land in 2003, was formed in 1905 by a small group of investors from Cedar Rapids, Mechanicsville, Davenport, Des Moines and Glidden to buy land in Louisiana. About 200 investors, most of whom are descendants of the original investors, are involved in St. Martin Land.

St. Martin Land, which still owns most of the initial 38,000 acres of land in Louisiana purchased by its founders, has invested more than $5 million in the development of St. Martin Airport Plaza.