As reported by Eric Heisler in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
An abandoned lab just south of downtown St. Louis is about to be reborn as an office building, becoming part of a larger effort to reuse parts of the mostly vacant Nooter Corp. campus.
The two-story, concrete-and-glass building was once a laboratory for Ethyl Petroleum Additives Inc. It was acquired by Nooter and was slated for redevelopment a few years ago, but plans went awry when the fabricator closed its manufacturing plants.
Now, a partnership led by Clark Properties of St. Louis has acquired the building. It will spend $1 million renovating the building for office space.
Clark is one of several developers reinvesting in the 68-acre, riverfront campus made up mostly of aging and abandoned industrial buildings.
“The reuse of land like this is important to our city,” said Michael Clark, president of Clark Properties. “When you have property that’s just sitting there vacant, it’s not good for St. Louis from an investment standpoint. Each time one of these gets redeveloped, it’s creating jobs in the community that aren’t there now.”
The building spans 28,000 square feet at 1530 South Second Street, just east of Soulard. The lab was built in 1986, and it served as a testing site for Ethyl Petroleum until it closed in 1997.
Shortly thereafter, the building was acquired by Nooter, a large fabricator founded in 1896. Nooter, known for producing gigantic vessels used by industry, had operated a large distribution and manufacturing campus near the Mississippi River.
Late last decade, Nooter planned to spend $20 million to redevelop the Ethyl site and several nearby properties into a 20-acre industrial park, Broadway Commerce Center. Next door to the Nooter campus, the park would have been the city’s first new industrial park south of Highway 40 (Interstate 64) in decades.
But the project hit a snag. Faced with overseas competition and falling demand, Nooter announced in 2001 that it would close its fabrication business. The decision put the proposed Broadway Commerce Center in jeopardy.
“At the time, Nooter decided it would get a better return on its investment by putting the money into its core businesses rather than into real estate,” said Tim Reeves, president of Keenan Properties, the company hired to handle Nooter’s real estate.
Still, other developers expressed interest in the properties. In addition to being close to downtown, the land is in the city’s Enterprise Zone, which makes new companies there eligible for tax credits.
Clark Properties, which has redeveloped older industrial sites in north St. Louis and Alton, led the partnership that acquired the former Ethyl lab from Nooter for $750,000 last year.
Clark’s partners are Environmental Operations Inc. and Legacy Building Group LLC. Those two companies will take up space in the building this year.
Meanwhile, other segments of the Nooter campus are being reused, Reeves said.
For example, Welsh Development, based in Minnesota, has acquired more than four acres, and it’s building a 125,000-square-foot building near the Ethyl site.
More than one-third of that space will be leased by Goodman Midwest, a manufacturer of heating and ventilation equipment.
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