News Roundup

$23M Renovation Brews at Falstaff

City Business
By Kathryn Jezer-Morton Staff Writer
July 2, 2007

NEW ORLEANS — By this time next year, the landmark weather ball and blinking sign will once again light up atop the Falstaff building in Mid-City, heralding the return of a piece of mid-century New Orleans nostalgia.

A $23-million renovation of the historic former brewery began in May and is now in full swing with 75 construction workers on site daily and more than 200 people working on the project including administrators and project managers.

Tad Mondale and David Miller of Renaissance Properties bought the crumbling structure in 2005 for $1.1 million.

The finished product will house 147 mixed-income apartments and several commercial spaces on the ground floor. Developing commercial space in the former Falstaff administrative offices could bring a brewpub, restaurant or café, according to project officials.

The oldest sections of the buildings were constructed in 1912. The building has not been used as a brewery since 1978.

The project was made possible with $1.2 million in low-income housing tax credits granted by the Louisiana Housing Finance Agency, which will create $12 million in equity over 10 years, Mondale said. The city of New Orleans also provided $1 million in investment partnership program funds.

“This project could not have happened had it not been for the hurricane,” Mondale said. “Since the hurricane there have been low-income tax credit releases in larger numbers. No one has ever seen this kind of flood of low-income tax credits before.”

Mondale said the credits removed some of the investing risk in the project.

Historic landmark

To transform a building designed to hold tanks of beer into apartments, HMS Architects cut windows into the thick outer walls but will do little else to change the exterior of the structure.

To bring sunlight into the interior apartments, a courtyard will run along the old railroad tracks built to pass through the building.

“It should be a nice space,” said Charles Montgomery, a principal at HMS. “It’s a long linear courtyard and it kind of Ts off and goes out onto a side street (South Rocheblave Street), with a second main entrance.”

Structure sections are seven- and eight-stories high with exterior walls four or five bricks wide — much wider than most buildings. Montgomery said the window jambs will reveal the thickness and scale of the historic building.

The thickness of the exterior walls and thermal windowpanes will make the building naturally energy efficient, Mondale said.

According to HMS Architects, the smallest one-bedroom apartments will be 550 square feet and the largest three-bedroom apartments will be about 1,100 square feet. The low-income designated apartments will start at $500 a month. “This is not Section 8,” Mondale clarified. “There will be an application screening process, where people will prove that they have some source of income.”

According to the Louisiana Housing Finance Agency, the tax credits come with a 15-year compliance requirement for maintaining low-income housing. The rent rates for the subsidized apartments are based on calculations of the area’s average median income. Tenants must earn 60 percent or less of the median for the New Orleans area.

“It will probably rent fairly rapidly,” said Wade Ragas, president of Real Property Associates Inc., a private real estate investment appraisal and market research firm in New Orleans. “It’s a site where there are very few other modern apartments and it has some very interesting architectural treatments.”

Ragas said even market-rate rental units in developments funded by low-income tax credits tend to be 10 percent to 15 percent cheaper than the prevailing market. “You have a goal in those programs to get very high occupancy, and often to get the market rate units rented you have to provide some incentive.”

Sign of the past

An iconic element is the vertical Falstaff sign rising high above the building and capped with a weather ball that has been out of commission since the 1970s.

Officials with Hahnville-based Brightway Signs said they have drawn up plans refurbish the Falstaff sign in hopes Mondale and Miller will hire them.

Gene Henne, Brightway vice president, said the 10-foot high letters on the darkened sign are made of rotting wood. They would be replaced with aluminum, rust-resistant replicas. “We’d be duplicating the exact letter style,” he said. “They’d be painted red.”

The letters would be lit with red light-emitting diode tubes with smaller bulbs lit with extra lighting sources. They look like neon but use much less energy.

“It’s a new product that’s in plastic tubing and it’s bendable. It costs more than neon but you make it up in the cost of your electric bill,” said Henne.

The letters would light one at a time from top to bottom before the entire word would flash together once, go dark and resume the spelling pattern.

Henne said they would electrify the ball with the same set of bulbs, which would change colors to predict the weather as in bygone days.

If Brightway nets the contract, Henne estimates it would take at least two months to refurbish the sign. Mondale expects to spend about $400,000 on sign repair and reconstruction alone.

“That building has been a difficult project that many people have looked at,” Ragas said. “I’m happy that we have developers here willing to stay at it in the face of adversity.”