MUNCIE, Ind. — After years of dusty sleep, the dormant Roberts Hotel is about to reawaken.
Work on the $17 million project to turn the hotel, closed since 2006, into senior housing could begin within two weeks. While months of construction will pass before tenants move into 83 apartments in the seven-story building, a new life for the downtown landmark finally seems to be on its way, The Star Press reported.
During a Friday meeting of the Muncie Redevelopment Commission, local real estate agent Ed Conatser and developer Pete Schwiegeraht of Cincinnati-based Miller Valentine Group said the launch of the Lofts at the Roberts project was imminent.
The closing on the sale of the building from Farmers Bank of Frankfort to Miller Valentine is set for Tuesday, they said. Conatser said a construction fence would go up around the property on Feb. 11 “with demolition to follow immediately.”
During a Star Press tour of the building — built in the 1920s, remodeled and expanded in the 1980s, shuttered by the former owner on Halloween 2006 — on Wednesday, the appearance of the city’s last downtown hotel made it obvious the project was coming none too soon.
Much of the Roberts looks like it did after a previous renovation attempt, a couple of years after its closing, fell through. And some of it looks like it did the day after the last guest checked out.
The hotel room beds are long gone, many doors are off their hinges and ceiling tiles litter some hallways, but nostalgic remnants of the hotel are scattered around the building: A room service menu here, piles of bedding there. Blueprints to the building, probably generated during the 1980s renovation and addition, lie on a table not far from a jar of keys.
There’s apparently been some water damage to the building over the years and a new roof is planned, to be paid for from $250,000 in facade restoration funds from the city.
“We were close to the point that the building would be lost,” MRC chairman Dan Allen said Friday.
Other than some peeling paint, the former hotel looks to be, in many spots, still in good shape.
There are some horror movie aspects to a walk-through the building. Besides the fact that the interior was a good 20 degrees colder than the outside air temperature on this unseasonably warm January day, guest room doorways loom on both sides of the dim hallways. The basement is a jumble of discarded lampshades and rusty equipment and the first-floor swimming pool, part of the 1980s addition, is a dark pit.
Schwiegeraht noted during Friday’s meeting that nine different funding sources — ranging from $1.3 million a year over 10 years in federal housing tax credits to $900,000 in city and county funding — were crucial to the project.
“This has been quite the undertaking,” Schwiegeraht said. “It took all this to make this possible.”
During the meeting, the MRC accepted ownership of 11,000 square feet of commercial space on the first floor of the building in exchange for the city’s share of the local funding.
Mayor Dennis Tyler said the first floor might already have one potential tenant: The Center for Vital Aging is considering locating there.
Tyler said the city and county’s investment was important not only to the project but also for the local decision-making it allowed.
“Muncie controls the first floor,” Tyler said. “We have the option to decide what goes in.”
“It’s an economic development opportunity,” Allen said, adding that officials want original, entrepreneur-driven commercial tenants.
“We’re not looking for an Applebee’s to be downtown,” he added.
Last-minute details before construction begins were being attended to, officials and principals in the project said last week. Conatser met Wednesday with neighbors of the hotel to make sure they had contact information for the project manager during months of demolition and construction.
And during Friday’s meeting, the MRC learned that, as part of its local investment, the board would have the use of 26 of 121 parking places at the hotel.
Schwiegeraht told the MRC that billboards south of the hotel property — near a possible development spot for a new hotel being considered by the city and a statewide disabled advocacy group, the Arc of Indiana — would be torn down when the Lofts at the Roberts construction was finished. In the meantime, Schwiegeraht said, the MRC could advertise for tenants for its first-floor commercial space on one of the boards.
Adding to the feeling that the time to redevelop the Roberts was close to overdue: Conatser noted the plaque on the outside of the Roberts, designating it as a building on the National Register of Historic Places, had been stolen.
