Developer Buys Butler Brothers Building, Bets on MLS Stadium
Date Posted: February 18, 2021
Posted In: Projects,
From St. Louis Post-Dispatch: A Memphis developer has purchased the historic Butler Brothers building on Olive Street, betting that momentum around Union Station and a new Major League Soccer stadium will finally make feasible a rehab of one of the largest empty buildings in the Downtown West neighborhood.
A company affiliated with Development Services Group of Memphis closed on the building at 1717 Olive Street last month. The company focuses on “adaptive reuse of historic buildings in urban communities around the U.S,” said Gary Prosterman, the firm’s president and CEO.
Development Services Group is still preparing plans for the building, Prosterman said.
“What we can say is we were attracted to it because we do believe in the momentum in the Downtown West area, but we’ve got to get much more immersed in the community,” he said. “These are big, long, hard projects.”
At over 700,000 square-feet, the 1906 structure built for the Butler Brothers wholesale firm of Chicago covers a whole city block between 17th and 18th Streets. When it was constructed, it was said to be the “largest structure in America occupied by a single wholesale concern,” according to the Washington Avenue Historic District’s nomination to the National Register of Historic Places. It has sat mostly unused for over a decade under the ownership of a New York real estate investment firm, Sovereign Partners. Efforts by the company to market the Butler Brothers building as a structure with space for as many as 350 apartments drew little serious interest.
Prosterman said “the most logical component” would be to rehab the structure mostly as apartments, with ground floor restaurants and bars that could cater to soccer fans in the area for games at the stadium under construction near Olive and 20th streets.