Former Chevalier Building To Be Housing By Summer
Inside a former mill building on Water Street that most recently housed a furniture showroom, contractors are busy at work creating a new future for the circa 1900 brick building.
The Canal Lofts in the former 95,000-square-foot Chevalier Furniture building at 48 Water St. in Worcester will add 77 new bedrooms and an influx of new residents to a growing neighborhood of businesses and restaurants known as the Canal District.
Work on the building began last summer and the project is now about half complete, according to Gilbert Winn, a principal at Boston-based Winn Development. Winn expects some tenants to be moving in by August.
The units were originally slated for completion by spring, but Winn said financing challenges and snowstorms pushed the timeline back several months.
Renovations
The brick exterior has been re-pointed, interior demolition is complete, new floors and ceilings were built and crews have installed a new roof and new windows that give the apartments inside plenty of natural light.
The one-bedroom units will range in size from 700 to 1,100 square feet and the two-bedroom units will range from 1,200 to 1,340 square feet. Apartments on the top and bottom floors of the four-and-a-half-story building will be duplex units, with a bedroom on a separate level from the rest of the living area.
Winn said that his company must abide by historic building regulations that require the developer, among other things, to maintain original window openings. Historic building rules also create a challenge for the building’s heating and cooling system installations, said Jay Syzmanski, an architect with The Architectural Team, a Chelsea-based firm.
“You have to take everything up through the roof,” Szymanski said. “You can’t go through the exterior walls.”
Further complicating matters, Winn said that the firm is also aiming to qualify for LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) status on the renovation.
Half of the 64 dwellings will be affordable by state standards and the other 32 will be rented at market rates. Income cutoffs for the 32 affordable units will be $37,500 for one-bedroom apartments and $45,000 for two-bedroom apartments. Half of the units could be sold after a five-year tax credit period, Winn said.
Winn Development bought the property for $1.3 million last year. The company also bought a parking lot across the street from a separate owner, which will provide one parking space per unit.
Winn said that the company decided to buy the building because officials liked the building’s layout and its location.
“We look at it as an up and coming area. An area that really needs housing stock,” he said.
On a tour of the building, where more than a dozen workers were busy inside, Project Director Elizabeth Fish said that the building’s former owners took pretty good care of it, making it easier for Winn Development to renovate.
“It cleaned up very well,” Fish said.
Winn is now looking forward to what he predicted will be a “steady lease-up” of the apartments and says he is excited to see the finished building.
But the outlook was not always rosy. The project faced obstacles early on. Just as Winn was seeking financing in 2008, the economy crashed.
“The banks were being very tough,” Winn said. “They were trying to stick to ‘Class A’ neighborhoods and projects. This is not yet a ‘Class A’ neighborhood.”
But Winn thinks his company’s project will help it get there.
After haggling with the banks, Winn acquired a $15-million construction loan as well as a slew of state and federal tax credits for historic preservation and low-income housing totaling nearly $9 million. New York-based Redstone Equity Partners also invested $18 million.
The financing worked, Winn thinks, because Worcester’s demographics defined a demand for both affordable and market-rate housing in the same area, a more attractive proposition to lenders.
Business owners, including David Lemenager, who co-owns the 86 Winter American Bistro on Water Street, have high hopes for the project. He said that 64 new apartments in the district means customers close by.
“Whenever you put in a residential component into a neighborhood trying to revive itself, it certainly helps,” Lemenager said. “These people will need places to eat, places to shop.”
And if the state increases the number of trains going from the nearby Union Station to Boston, Lemenager said that there is no reason that young professionals couldn’t live at the lofts and commute east each morning.
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