With news of Carlyle moving to redevelop the Junction, and with War Horse Development being mostly MIA in trying to rehabilitate the 1020 W Pratt St site, it seems well within the purview of Southwest Partnership to take the project on.
The building is 173x90 and the 1020 Corporation includes most of the lots on Mt Clare St. Since it owns both sides of this dead end block of Lemmon, it should be possible to get the city to just remove that alley entirely.
The ground floor features freight doors on multiple sides, and has egress from all sides. It would require a lot of brick restoration work to make the exterior look good, plus windows placed in most of the portals.
It could accommodate a bunch of different uses:
Ground Floor
- Partitioned commercial units. Its 16k sq ft on the ground floor, so it could hold a bunch of restaurants, but its more likely we’d want a larger tenant.
- Possible new home for the combo Back Yard + Silver Canon. The Back Yard is a major area amenity but is constrained by the footprint of the rowhouse they operate out of. Considering their second floor tenants of the Silver Canon game shop, they could move into the ground floor of this building with a combination bar / tavern and game shop, with private tabletop rooms available with food / drink wait service. Could also host larger events like card game tournaments.
- Fine dining restaurant. The expansive cellar would well fit a wine cellar, and the ceilings are sufficiently high for a well styled dining room.
- Makerspace. The plethora of freight doors and original industrial use well suit the site to being a small scale industrial warehouse if a tenant could be found that is interested. We do already have a few rental spaces like this around already though, so the market is a bit saturated.
- Tool Library. Talked to Scott about this a fair bit - we would emulate or maybe even directly tenant a branch of the Station North Tool Library and just call it the Sowebo Tool Library. Plenty of room for a wood shop as well. Could make a deal with Second Chance to provide small stock lumber and materials.
Upper Floors
- New Southwest Partnership Office. If Southwest wanted to sell the 1315 W Baltimore building for a more trafficked commercial use, the upper floors of this building could be a good alternative office / meeting space, especially if the interior is done to make it convenient to get to from entry - elevators at least.
- Veterinarian. We don’t really have a vet in Southwest, so this could also fit in as a ground floor use, but a vets office would be great to have locally, and there is definitely enough space here where vets are often a practice slightly too large for a rowhouse but not big enough for some of our larger commercial properties.
- Rental housing. Easy default, similar adaptive reuse to several other buildings in the area. High ceiling industrial apartments tend to garner a really good price premium. Probably not a great idea with the Junction redevelopment across the street also being apartments, though - the Junction will be adding a huge number to the market.
- Condominiums. It would be cool if the entire building were done as a cooprative condo association, including commercial tenants (tool library, for sure). This is something that a CDC nonprofit like Southwest Partnership would be extremely well equipped to do, in a city where new condos are rare, espcially in Southwest.
- Assisted living center. Another mark on top of the condo suggestion - this building will warrant an elevator or even two, and as such is one of the few places we can do ada compatible stair-free living in Southwest without massive rowhouse rehab projects. The location is closer to UMMS than most similarly large buildings to rehab, and SWP could get the UMMS shuttle routes to come to this building specifically. The availability of offstreet parking also really helps and the large curbs and multiple busses directly around it are a great amenity.
Basement
- Wine cellar for any restaraunt uses.
- Private residential storage.
- Tool storage for a tool library
- Depending on roof height, possibly underground parking garage?
Roof
- Solar panels. The roof is high enough to be unobstructed, and there is a lot of square footage to install pretty well accessible solar panels.
- Roof deck. Well suited to go along with dining on the ground floor, especially with how the building basically needs elevators. Major cell to have rooftop dining, but even a general roof deck for residents is a big amenity.
- Dog park. Would require most of the building to be residential, but another big value add would be a private rooftop dog park.
- Pickleball courts. Could also do tennis. Would require some pretty big nets to surround the roof to avoid balls going over the edge, but the roof is actually a great size for some kind of sports court use, and isn’t too high where wind becomes a major issue.
Rear Lots
- A closed Lemmon Street could be repurposed as an outdoor dining patio.
- The entire current parking lot could be a parklet event space.
- The opposite lots almost always become offstreet parking, though something could theoretically be built there.
- Mt Clare St is a unique opportunity - because the rowhouses around its entry have been demoed on both ends, its possible to widen it into a much nicer pedestrian street. See streetmix concept:
The road bed could even be sidewalk level to make it more like European pedestrian streets. This would really help activate the back of the building and the plaza, and would pair extremely well with the junction redevelopment across the street.