Historic buildings get break

The historic Rookery and Mohawk buildings were granted a temporary reprieve from the wrecking ball Monday as a pair of Los Angeles developers stepped up with an 11th-hour offer to buy the downtown Spokane block they sit on.

“This is very, very exciting news,” said Teresa Brum, Spokane’s historic preservation officer. “It’s exciting news for all of Spokane.”

Property owner Wendell Reugh has been trying for three years to find a developer willing to pay $4.5 million for the majority of the block bounded by Riverside, Sprague, Howard and Stevens. Those efforts appeared to have failed in October when demolition began on the block’s smaller buildings. Last week, crews began tearing down the 1890 Merton building, which was downtown Spokane’s oldest intact structure.

The three-story Rookery, built in 1934, and the seven-story Mohawk, built in 1915, remain standing. Historic preservation advocates have held protests and petition drives in an attempt to save the buildings.

Los Angeles development firm Renaissance Community Fund LLC has paid a nonrefundable deposit for the property, said principal Craig Stevens. Renaissance plans to renovate the Rookery into condominiums and the Mohawk into apartments. An additional condominium building would be built on empty land on the block, as well as a parking structure, Stevens said. The street level would offer retail space.

However, Stevens cautioned that the deal isn’t scheduled to close until February and his firm has a lot of work to do.

“I don’t want to get anybody’s hopes up. We have constructed an offer that allows us to have some breathing room where we have an opportunity to possibly save the block,” Stevens said. Though he said his firm will end up paying Reugh more than $4.5 million, the deal “allows us to defer some of that. It allows us not to come up with as much cash. The way we constructed it, we hope we can make it work.”

Stevens would not elaborate on the details of the deal. He did say, however, that if the project goes forward, it would cost more than $30 million to develop.

“A lot is going to be based on the condition the buildings are in. We’ve run some pretty conservative numbers to try to figure out where we are. But the buildings are in really bad shape,” Stevens said. “This is a deal that hopefully everybody comes together on and realizes nobody’s going to get rich on. We think it would be devastating to have that block torn down in the middle of downtown and just have an empty parking lot.”

Stevens’s partner, Charles Loveman, will come to Spokane next week to meet with city officials about the project.

Stevens said he discovered Spokane a few months ago while visiting his son who was attending summer camp in Idaho. He stayed at the Davenport Hotel and found the city to be “absolutely charming.”

After the trip, Stevens, who has 30 years of development experience, talked to Loveman, who has renovated historic buildings for housing in downtown Los Angeles. The pair enlisted Tomlinson Black agents Earl Engle and Mitch Swenson to show them downtown Spokane properties. Engle and Swenson included the Rookery Block in those offerings.

“If it hadn’t been for those guys, that block would be in back of a dump truck,” Mark Pinch, president of Tomlinson Black Commercial, said of Engle and Swenson. “That block has been a major focus of our firm for a year and a half.”

Steve Gill, Reugh’s property manager, said although other developers have made offers on the block, none were accepted because they called for Reugh to shoulder too much of the risk.

“Real money changed hands for the first time,” Gill said. “We’re absolutely thrilled.”