Meet Brian Cassidy, A Phoenix Community Alliance “City-Shaper”

Brian Cassidy has always been a believer in Downtown.

Working within the community for more than 30 years, he and his firm, CCBG Architects, have been a substantial player in the gradual transformation of Downtown, acting as the unofficial architecture firm responsible for defining the character and fabric of our neighborhood.

Using Roosevelt as a starting point, the firm is responsible for more than 75 Downtown projects of differing sizes. A sample includes The Nash, The Stewart, Union on Roosevelt, the former R&R Partners space, Alta Warehouse District, and their offices at 1^st Street and Buchanan Street.

And then there’s his work inside and adjacent to Phoenix Community Alliance. Decades as a managing partner have allowed him to influence local development, from helping form the Warehouse District Council in 2014 to crystalizing best development systems and process proposals by Central City Planning & Development (CCPD) Committee members, where he serves as Vice Chair, into an actionable document for the City of Phoenix in 2020. This eventually formed the basis for SHAPE PHX.

PCA was built on the foundation of industry professionals who all shared the same goal: to use their expertise to benefit the Greater Downtown Phoenix community.

CCBG Architects and Warehouse District Council President Brian Cassidy pictured outside the Downtown Phoenix, Inc./Phoenix Community Alliance (PCA) offices. Cassidy also serves as PCA’s Central City Planning & Development (CCPD) Committee Vice Chair. (Photo: Taylor Costello)

PCA: It’s the early 1980s; what motivated you to join CCBG Architects?

Brian Cassidy: The original “C” George Christiansen recruited me to work for him. He was a pillar of the local custom home design market, going back to the late 50s. He and I became friends when I was a student [at ASU]. I went from an employee to a managing partner in about six years.

It was just a boutique, seven-to-eight-person firm at the time. Nobody trusted us to do anything more than one story. We slowly grew the firm, doing bigger stuff.

One of the projects we had done [before we moved Downtown] was a renovation of the Knights of Pythias building in 1982 for Alan Mishkin. Then, in the Fall of ’91, we moved to the building across the street from Matt’s Big Breakfast, which we renovated. [Former PCA Vice Chair] Kurt Schneider and his dad owned the property. Kurt was the first person we met who was active Downtown.

When we moved in, nothing was going on in Roosevelt. We staked the entire future of our firm on being Downtown. We said, “How can architects sit around in this city that’s [supposedly] dead and not want to help revive it?” That was our motivation.

The results of CCBG Architects “dropping a creative agency” into what would become the Warehouse District in 2002. Before the Moses Anshell office transformation, the former plumber supply building was a warehouse for car bumpers. (Photos: Phoenix Business Journal)

PCA: In 2002, when CCBG was hired to create office space for Moses Anshell in the Warehouse District, how much of the design process was reimagining an industrial space for commercial usage?

Cassidy: All we literally did was clean it up and drop a creative agency into it. It’s got this series of two-story volumes, and then the mezzanine is connected by North-facing clerestory windows, which is the ideal type of [natural] light [to illuminate the space]. It’s the only building like it in Downtown. They were truly pioneering in the Warehouse District.

When the tech companies came [in the 2010s], they were attracted to the old buildings because they were spacious, unique, and funky spaces that weren’t shiny brass towers. When R&R Partners bought their building (Ong Gyut Wholesale Warehouse), they sat on it for six or seven years because the market crashed [while they were in the U.S. Bank Building]. And when they moved in, it was a talent magnet.

PCA: This year marks a decade since stakeholders in the Warehouse District formed a Council around it. What circumstances resulted in that formation?

Cassidy: It all started with Greg Stanton, in his early days as the Mayor of Phoenix; he talked to a handful of us and said, “Stuff is going to start happening; you oughta start getting organized.” It was ten years ago this summer that we had our first meeting at The Duce [that slowly migrated to Bitter & Twisted]. Billy Shields, one of this group of about nine, suggested, “We just opened this cool cocktail lounge. Let’s go.”

[DPI President & CEO] Dave Krietor was there. [R&R Partners Managing Partner] Matt Silverman was there. Bentley [Calverley, former owner at Warehouse 215, who now operates Bentley Gallery from the IDA] was one of them. A couple of other people like Brad Jannenga, the co-founder of webPT, and Mike Cowley, who did Galvanize, The Larry, and Kaizen, were involved.

[Phoenix Suns Former Senior VP for Public Affairs] Maria Baier was active initially. And I think [Deputy City Manager] Rick Naimark had been part of it. That was the nucleus of the group.

That first formation meeting was where we started finding common ground. Our whole idea was to make people aware of the area and convince them that this was a viable place to do stuff. We all agreed that the Warehouse District was this unpolished gem.  

PCA was an integral part of that matchmaking.

Through Krietor’s recommendation, we hired a facilitator named Nancy Hormann [of Hormann and Associates] to schedule a half-day visioning workshop at Bentley Gallery[, now Warehouse 215]. By the end of the meeting, they said, “Let’s pick somebody to take charge.” They asked me to do it, and I said, “Sure, why not?”

Because of its connections to Members, PCA and the Council have been inexorably linked. PCA continues serving as its fiscal agent, administering funds and handling membership invoicing. Subsequently, our organization helped the WDC incorporate as its own entity.

PCA: CCBG has been a key firm responsible for transforming Downtown. How has the firm honored the historic architectural footprint of the local buildings for clients?

Cassidy: We’ve lost so much of our core historic Downtown infrastructure that almost every building is precious. Our attitude is preservation first, [and then adaptive reuse]. If [the building is] good, it’s good. If there’s a building worth salvaging, we’ll find a way to convince our clients or recommend saving key elements like the [expansion of] the Stewart [Motor Co. building into a high-rise]. It sat empty for years. There was no income and hardly any tax base, and the neighborhood was leery because [it would be a] big building on Roosevelt. So, it was a test case to get through zoning.

But now it’s a case study on expanding into a high-rise with adaptive reuse. And then we got Snooze [in the old Circles Discs & Tapes store] as a tenant, and [it proves ground-floor] retail is an amenity.

The Three Lives of the Stewart Motor Company: Starting in the 1940s, the historic building served as a Studebaker dealership, then as Circles Discs & Tapes, and finally as Snooze, an A.M. Eatery. (Photos: Anne Stewart Zell, Ms. Phoenix (Flickr), and CCBG Architects)

PCA: People who walk in the front door at CCBG probably don’t realize the person behind the front desk is you, the managing partner at the company. What caused that practice to start?

Cassidy: It’s a unique dynamic. My office manager resigned because her husband died of cancer. And she just said, “I can’t focus; I’m gonna move on.” It was very sad. So I said, “Okay, I’ll sit here and do what you did until we find an office manager.”

Well, 14 years later, I’m still sitting there. A few people will rotate when I’m traveling, so nobody comes in and robs us blind. And they all say, “God, it’s pretty quiet down there.” And that’s why I love it. I can sit, work, and focus. I can design and do business development.

We’re on street level, and I get to talk to everybody coming into the office. A lot of them don’t know who I am.  A couple of times a week, people ask for information.

PCA: Do you envision the future tenants of our Warehouse District as being similar to the River North Arts District (RiNo) in Denver, which has a mixture of retail, arts, and dining?

Cassidy: I’m glad you asked the question that way. We have an incredibly bright future, but it won’t consist of parking lots only used for games and concerts. That will change quickly.

As someone who grew up in Denver and still visits once or twice a year, I think we should benchmark with RiNo because that’s what the Warehouse District will look like in ten years.

RiNo runs along a train route. They have railroad switching yards. Denver also has commuter trains and other older infrastructure we need. The city has invested more, from the sidewalks and street lighting to the graphics on the trash.

The future of Downtown’s Warehouse District includes the Phoenix Suns & Mercury: In July, the site’s transformation was completed with a Mercury practice court that opened in time for the 2024 WNBA All-Star Game. In a previous life, the facility was a former Coors distribution warehouse. (Photo: Taylor Costello)

Downtown Phoenix has the youngest and fastest-growing urban core but is the least developed in the Warehouse District. Because of COVID, we lost our daily employment base and killed our tech tenancy [like WebPT, which accounted for much of our businesses].

Since [Phoenix Suns Owner Matt Ishbia] took one of our biggest empty buildings [the former Lincoln Union space, once a Coors distribution facility] and quickly moved staff into a good environment to recapture that arena space for more food and beverage. Now, there are 330+ Suns employees in that building.

Over time, our Warehouse District will be the conduit to get people from the airport into Downtown. You’ll see that area expand to Buckeye or farther south because we’re in the middle. Everything between here and the [State] Capitol going west could redevelop into a RiNo-scale.

Ten years from now, I could see 5,000 units built in the Warehouse District.

And why wouldn’t that happen? We have nowhere to go but up.

Cassidy has watched Downtown evolve from decades of commutes into work.

On the horizon, he describes the area west of Downtown, from 1st Avenue to 7th Avenue, stopping at Van Buren Street, as the “Fertile Crescent,” where projects are ripe for high-density mixed-use developments. The neighborhood’s historic bungalows co-existing with ground-floor food, beverage, and retail amenities in one large urban, walkable area

His current energy and determination come from enacting that strategic vision.

In the fall, the Phoenix City Council votes on an update of the Downtown Code chapter within Phoenix Zoning Ordinances, which Cassidy and fellow CCPD Members collaborated with City of Phoenix Planning & Development Department staff to refine. Their revisions clarify or evolve the standards and values of our pedestrian-oriented, dynamic urban center. He views the document as an opportunity to articulate quality development standards that are implicit within the text.

It’s a slow process, but the rewards will be sweeter.