A determined band of churchgoers and residents is about to revive three 130-year-old grade-school buildings as the first loft apartments in the city’s Soulard neighborhood.
If all goes as planned, 20 apartments with unusually large windows, restored woodwork and wooden floors will open in the spring with rents of about $575 to $800 a month.
To make the $1.8 million project work, the group is using a combination of private and public money, coupled with federal and state tax credits–a financing technique that successful rehabbers in other cities have been using for years.
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“What this tells me is that if we set our minds to doing something, we can do it,” said Philip Willman, board president of Peter and Paul Housing Corp. in Soulard.
“This is a story of public and private and different interests coming together, seeing a problem and getting it resolved,” he said.
The problem, in this case, has been the three, four-story-tall red brick school buildings standing in a row and idle for nearly 30 years next to the historic St. Peter & Paul Catholic Church. The German Gothic stone church, still in use, was finished in the late 1890s at Eighth Street and Allen Avenue.
Since the church closed the school buildings in 1969, the only occupant has been a small church-sponsored community service organization.
The school buildings date back to 1853, when the first one was constructed. In 1861, the congregation built a convent building for the Sisters of Notre Dame, later converted as a school. The third school building was built in 1863.
About four years ago, some parishioners, long concerned about the fate of the historic buildings, hired Kenneth Nuernberger, a development consultant who is president of The Siedlund Co., and architect Thomas H. Cohen.
Together, the group came up with the idea of loft apartments in the buildings and formed the not-for-profit Peter and Paul Housing Corp. to get the job done.
Willman said that although the buildings are extremely old, “the church has been keeping them up over the years. So structurally, they are in excellent condition.”
“And the interiors have tremendous spaces,” he said.
“Many of the classrooms still have pressed tin ceilings very much intact,” Willman said.
The financing package, now nearly complete, includes:
– An agreement by the Archdiocese of St. Louis, which owns the buildings, to donate them to the not-for-profit corporation.
– A $725,000 conventional loan from Jefferson Bank & Trust.
– More than $500,000 in equity raised through the use of federal historic tax credits, and affordable-housing tax credits approved by the Missouri Housing Development Commission. The investor is the St. Louis Equity Fund, supported by major corporations throughout the area.