A growing Kansas City startup looks to throw a bone to Downtown dog owners pining for a place to board, train and relax with their canine companions.
CITYDOGs is in its fifth week in a pop-up location at 2001 Walnut St. in the Crossroads Arts District, and plans to grow into a larger site across the street in April 2022. There, the business will become an anchor for Freight House Village Square, a commercial and office junction envisioned by 3D Development northeast of Walnut and 20th streets.
In early 2021, 3D Development founder Vince Bryant and veteran marketer Peter Leondedis, of Pls Fix Communications, concocted the concept for CITYDOGs over pizza, seeking to address what they saw as a lack of downtown dog care and boarding services.
The pair pulled in 3D Development's Greg Hellbusch; also a certified field trial judge for pointing dog breeds; Dante Passantino, of Passantino Property Partners LLC; and Erin Dean, already no stranger to canine-focused entrepreneurship, to serve as CITYDOGs' owner.
Dean owns and operates Sydney's Pet Resort and Spa, which she founded in Leawood in 2006 and expanded to Wichita in 2015. Compared to a traditional dog boarding service, CITYDOGs not only houses dogs but also provides in-house grooming and training services. It also sports indoor and outdoor play areas both for dogs in its care and for members of the public interested in stopping by with their pups.
"We're able to offer all (services) here under one facility," Dean said. "We'll be able to accommodate anyone that wants to just drop their dog off while they go to work or on weekends, when they want to come and actually spend time with their dog and hang out outside."
At its temporary location, CITYDOGs has two indoor parks totaling 8,000 square feet and another 8,000 square feet outside, divided into four areas for dogs of different sizes. Upon moving to its permanent site, within a barrel-roof portion of the existing structure at 20th and Walnut, Bryant said the startup's space will increase to about 9,000 indoor square feet and 17,000 square feet of outdoor green space in place of an existing surface lot.
CITYDOGs' home at 1985 Walnut St. will include an indoor lounge with a coffee and wine bar, plus an outdoor bar, yard games, grilling stations and a concert and event stage. The business also will see its boarding capacity tripled from its current 50 dogs per night, and its daycare capacity doubled from its present range of 50 to 70 dogs.
Dean said one group CITYDOGs hopes to service is office users in need of daytime care. For many dogs accustomed to the presence of owners working from home, a return to the office is likely to instill separation anxiety, according to the American Kennel Club.
"The daycare is really picking up and it's mostly people that work all day and can't get home around lunchtime to let their dog out, so essentially like what you would do with your kids, they drop them off and go to work and then pick them and they're tired when you get home," Dean said.
So far, Dean said the Crossroads community's response to CITYDOGs has been "phenomenal." With help from its newest business partner Todd Miller, she said CITYDOGs is in the preliminary stages of evaluating expansions into other downtown markets in surrounding Midwestern states, such as Iowa and Nebraska.
Supplementing CITYDOGs within Freight House Village Square will be City Coffee, a coffee and ice cream shop within adjoining offices at 100 E. 20th Street. Bryant said he could not yet disclose the shop's operators but noted that it will include a front porch concept at 20th and Walnut. A 3,000-square-foot specialty retail space and 2,000-square-foot boutique office space remains available in that building.
Rounding out the development to the north, at 1905 Walnut St., is a single-story barrel-roof office building currently occupied by Bearing Distributors Inc. Bryant said the building will feature 8,000 square feet of boutique offices, divisible into 5,000 and 3,000-square-foot spaces.
Originally completed in the 1950s, the half-block's two structures once supported an Anheuser-Busch distributorship that had been located onsite for more than 100 years. Bryant said Freight House Village Square now will serve as a connector between 3D Development's Corrigan Station project to the northwest and its upcoming $87.7 million Freight House Village multifamily and office conversion effort just south.
Interior demolition and design work for Freight House Village Square are underway, with new construction expected to begin by the year's end.
Suzie Aron, of Aron Real Estate, is serving as broker for the project's remaining commercial spaces.
