For years, the Grandview Arcade at 3600 S. Grand Blvd. was one of those buildings people drove past and wondered about. Now it's close to having residents again.
The Community Builders Network of Metro St. Louis reported Oct. 6 that the 101-year-old building, at the southeast corner of Grand and Miami, was less than a month from opening after a historic rehab. It's part of Marquette Homes, a multi-site affordable housing development in the Dutchtown and Gravois Park neighborhoods.
Lutheran Development Group and Rise Community Development are the developers. CORE10 Architecture is leading the design, E. M. Harris Construction Company is the general contractor, and the City of St. Louis Community Development Administration helped support the project.
A building worth saving
The Grandview Arcade went up in 1925 as an office and retail building, and its central arcade was the entrance to the Melba Theater behind it. The theater came down in 1964 after a fire, but the arcade building stayed. Over the years, it housed offices and shops, and Pizza A-Go-Go got its start there. Then it sat empty while plans for condos and apartments came and went.
What made it worth the trouble was how much survived. Original interior doors, marble, granite, terra cotta, decorative plasterwork, cast-iron railings, light fixtures, terrazzo floors and original windows were still there, and some pieces removed from the facade had been stored in the basement.
The rehab is keeping as much of that as possible. Historic marble and terrazzo remain in the arcade, and original doors and details are being restored. Large new windows, recreated to match the originals, light the apartments. Where exterior terra cotta and plasterwork had been lost, the team took molds from surviving pieces and used them to make replacements with 3D printing.
"The whole 2nd and 3rd floors are all terrazzo, which we are finishing and repairing," Kevin Scronce, the construction superintendent on the site, told First Alert 4 in June. "It's all new, but its all the same as it was 100 years ago."
What's inside
When it opens, the Grandview will have about four commercial spaces, shared restrooms and breakout rooms for commercial tenants, and 16 affordable apartments: three one-bedroom, ten two-bedroom and three three-bedroom units. Two ADA-accessible apartments will be on the first floor. The apartments will serve households earning 30% and 60% of the area median income.
First Alert 4 reported that the Grandview is the largest building in the project, at 30,000 square feet. Mark Stroker, director of real estate development for Rise, told the station Marquette Homes includes more than 50 units of new and adaptive reuse affordable housing. (CBN's story puts the total at 60 apartments.) The project costs $26 million.
The money was the hard part. LDG and Rise bought the property in late 2022. The building's small footprint limited the number of apartments, and neighborhood rents couldn't support a conventional redevelopment, so the deal leaned on low-income housing tax credits and historic tax credits.
"The hardest part of this is compiling the financing. This project has 10 layers in financing in it," Stroker said. "It's the only way to get projects like this done. To generate that income, the rents would have to be extraordinary."
As of early October, there was still work left. CBN reported that floors needed more restoration, historic doors needed finishing, some storefront glass still had to go in, and a few apartments were waiting on kitchens, appliances and final touches.
"When you look around the city, there are so many buildings like this waiting for redevelopment," said Jessica Henry of Rise. "It's not easy, but it's possible to turn it into beautiful, affordable housing."
Why it matters for Contractors
The Grandview is a case study in historic tax credit work: terrazzo repair and refinishing, marble restoration, recreated windows, restored doors, and terra cotta and plaster replacements made from molds of the originals. That's specialty work, and preservation-savvy masons, plasterers, glaziers, finish carpenters and terrazzo crews are in demand on deals like this. E. M. Harris Construction Company is the general contractor, so it's the name to know on Marquette Homes. And as Stroker put it, there are a lot of projects like this down the street. With LIHTC and historic credits stacked together, St. Louis' stock of vacant historic buildings is a steady pipeline for contractors who can work carefully in old structures.