The Downtown Commission yesterday approved two different plans to tear down small buildings and replace them with parking lots. Both buildings are vacant, surrounded by other surface parking lots, and are controlled by entities with bigger development plans for the immediate area.
The first case heard was for 225 N. Sixth St., where a 24-space, landscaped parking lot will replace the one-story building on the site.
With so much of downtown’s urban fabric lost to the wrecking ball, demolition requests have always been a hot topic for the commission, which was established in 1997. The board’s guidelines discourage approving any demolition without first approving a certificate of appropriateness for a replacement building, and two recent requests to tear down larger buildings and replace them with parking were denied.
“I just want to point out that I recently read that there’s 220 acres of surface parking in downtown, the last thing we need is another surface parking lot,” said commissioner Bob Loversidge, during the discussion of the Sixth Street proposal (the latest count is actually 214 acres).
However, the commission in August had already granted approval to the proposal – conditioned on the applicant coming back with a landscaping plan – with many board members acknowledging that the nondescript building was not significant architecturally.
The owner of the parcel, Hackman Capital Partners, has accumulated significant holdings in the immediate area, including the former Bureau of Vital Statistics building at 225 Neilston St., which will be converted into a 33,000-square-foot entertainment complex.
The company was represented at the meeting by Joe Miller, of the Vorys law firm, who said that his client owns seven nearby surface lots and 12 buildings, and is “looking at large-scale redevelopment in the area.”
The second case heard by the commission was for 147 Vine St., where the building that once held the Dahlia Nightclub will be torn down and replaced with a non-landscaped, gravel parking lot.
Property owner Adam Lewin and lawyer Aaron Underhill argued that there were safety concerns with keeping the building, and that it would be better to utilize the parcel for parking – temporarily – until a larger development plan for the area came together.
They had been before the commission in February with a request to demolish two buildings – 147 Vine St. and the former BBR Restaurant, at 106 Vine St. – but have since found a tenant for the BBR building (Rockbridge, the developer of the Merchant Building, will use it as a construction/leasing office).
Lewin is the CEO of Hamilton Parker, the Columbus-based company that sells bricks and other building materials. His family also owns the gravel parking lot to the west of the former Dahlia building, two gravel parking lots across Vine Street, and the one-story building on Park Street that holds Gaswerks and Brothers Bar & Grill.
Lewin told the commission that paving and improving the lots they own would be “completely cost prohibitive and detrimental to development,” adding that the plan is to develop the lots in partnership with Nationwide Realty Investors (NRI), the developer of much of the Arena District.
“Where we are as a family, my conversation with my sisters has been, it is our generation’s responsibility to develop this property, we are not going to leave it to our kids to develop this…so that’s why we went into not just parceling out the development, but actually entering into an agreement with NRI,” he said.
“Their view is that entering into a long term lease with another tenant like they had in here is not in the best interest of the community at large,” added Underhill. “NRI has an option to place [all of the holdings] it into a partnership with the Lewin family for redevelopment…the last time [the commission] asked us if we could provide some general concept plans for how we saw this redeveloping in the future, and so those have been provided.”
Site plans submitted to the commission show two five-story buildings on either side of Vine Street, holding a total of 184 residential units, although Underhill stressed that the plans were “very conceptual” and could change.
Some commissioners said that the applicant should at least be required to improve the lot by paving it and adding landscaping, but others argued that because the other surrounding lots aren’t developed, it would be enough to place a time limit on the approval – the applicant will be required to come back in five years and either present a plan for redevelopment or risk being cited with a zoning violation.
The motion to approve the demolition and gravel lot passed four votes to three.
For more information on the Downtown Commission, see www.columbus.gov.
