Offices to fill Ram building

A former restaurant and brewery building near the Spokane Veterans Memorial Arena will have new life when it reopens in March as home to an architecture firm and real estate office.

The three-story Park Center Building, at 908 N. Howard, has been vacant since the Ram Restaurant and Brewery closed in June 2003. Ram International LLC, based in Lakewood, Wash., owned the Ram and still owns C.I. Shenanigan’s restaurant, next to the Spokane Convention Center. Through a subsidiary called Howard Street Land Co., Ram International sold the building to Park Center Building LLC for $1.6 million in June 2005, title records show.

The four partners that make up Park Center Building LLC are renovating the building for office space. Three of the partners — Ric Lake, John Becker and Joe Nichols — are Windermere real estate franchise owners in Spokane. They are joined by Dick Vandervert, owner of Vandervert Construction, Lake said.

Lake, owner of Windermere City Group, plans to move his office, with almost 30 staff members, into the building’s 6,000-square-foot first floor. The upper two floors have been leased to the Spokane offices of Portland architecture firm David Evans and Associates, Lake said.

The partners also bought an adjacent parking lot, which has 70 spaces for use by the building tenants and their customers, Lake said.

“All the landscaping has been done trying to blend with city sidewalks and streets,” said Lake, who noted that the building was built in the early 1900s. “It should blend very well with that entrance going into the (Riverfront) park. We’re hoping we’ll be able to make it look very historic.”