Old Sacramento hotels rise again (as offices)
Scurfield to pull permits in a month or two on re-creation of former Ebner and Empire hotels
Friday, February 15, 2008
Sacramento Business Journal - by Mark Anderson
The Orleans Hotel is a former hotel being rebuilt as a mixed-use project
near the former Ebner and Empire hotels in Old Sacramento.
The Scurfield Co. and Carson Development are putting plans through the city for their new building, a re-creation of the historic Ebner and Empire hotels.
Old Sacramento's newest hotel could begin construction in a matter of months.
The $6 million project could begin construction in the spring. The building, along with the ongoing construction of the Orleans Hotel site on 2nd Street, will fill two of the four large vacant lots in Old Sacramento, the historic district that is the region's top tourism draw.
Fifty-three of the buildings in Old Sacramento are on the National Register of Historic Places. Any new building has to blend in with the neighborhood, which dates back to the 1850s.
The Ebner/Empire building will be a single structure made to look like the two neighboring historic hotels. Both buildings have been gone for years. The Empire Hotel collapsed many decades ago. The city tried to save the Ebner, but with its crumbling walls and unsafe foundation, the city eventually had to tear down its hulking shell five years ago to keep it from collapsing onto neighboring buildings.
The new building will be at 116 and 118 K St. in the center of the historic district.
New building, same look
The Ebner/Empire will have street-level retail and professional offices on its two upper floors, said Dave Scurfield, owner of the Scurfield Co., a property management company.
The new building will look like the originals, with balconies over K Street, and all the flourishes of the old structures. The 24,000-square-foot building will likely be home to a large restaurant and another smaller retail space, Scurfield said. The two upper floors will be Class A office space.
"We can't get quite the rates the downtown buildings get, but there are a lot of people who want to be in the historic district," he said. "Our other buildings down there have done quite well with law firms."
After a variety of delays, the Ebner/Empire project is now moving along nicely, said Sheri Smith, project manager with the city's Downtown Development Group. The building had run into some issues with the soils in the area. They are less stable than previously believed, so the footings for the foundation had to be redesigned. The building is also only a block from the river, so water tables are a concern.
The developer should be able to submit for entitlements in a month or so and building permits soon afterward. Smith said the Ebner/Empire could be under construction in a couple of months. More than half the cost of the Ebner/Empire, about $3.3 million, is coming from the city.
Orleans rises
On the next block, at 1022 2nd St., business owner Lloyd Harvego is finishing up his $12 million building that will be a re-creation of the former Orleans Hotel. The building will have ground-floor retail and three stories of apartments.
Harvego said he's on track to complete his building in July. About half the cost of the reconstruction on the Orleans is being subsidized by the city.
The city since the 1960s has been maintaining and developing the historic district. Old Sacramento, once a seedy skid row, now draws millions of visitors each year. The city in 2003 went looking for replacement buildings to fill four vacant lots in the historic district. Any projects have to be historically accurate to what was built on the site, and construction has to be handled delicately because many of the neighboring buildings are more than 150 years old.
So far, the only people willing to take on the task are those already there. Scurfield owns and manages several buildings in the district, and Harvego owns the Firehouse restaurant and the 1853 historic fire station that houses it.
"It's good to see we're finally making some progress," Harvego said. "The Ebner is a good site, and having a building there will make it a nicer area. It will attract more people."
Doing construction work in Old Sac is proving to be slightly tricky, Smith said. For example, maps could show some kind of right of way or utility under an alley, but no one knows for sure until they dig it out whether it's a small conduit line or some utility encased in a massive concrete vault.
With the Orleans project and the Ebner/Empire projects under way, that leaves that square block with only one vacant lot remaining, which is owned by Harvego. He uses it for the Firehouse's parking lot.
Harvego is working with the city to determine what that lot could become. Unlike the Orleans and the Ebner/Empire lots, which had single historic structures on them, the Firehouse parking lot has had several types of buildings on it since the Gold Rush.
"It's had a lot of different things on it over the years," Harvego said, though it's been vacant for at least 40 years.
http://sacramento.bizjournals.com/sacramento/stories/2008/02/18/story4.html
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