PARTING SHOTS
APARTMENT FINANCE TODAY • MAY 2008
Rehab Reaches New Heights
The historic Railway Express Lofts building is perched above a highway
and a train line on one of Baltimore’s main streets.
By Bendix Anderson
Baltimore—It’s hard to
take in the odd geometry of
the Railway Express Lofts.
The building sits at the bottom
of the old Jones Falls
River Valley, squeezed in
between a six-lane
Interstate highway and a
train line.
Twenty-two feet above the ground,
the top half of Railway Express reaches
up to the level of St. Paul Street, which
passes over the valley like a bridge. The
upper part of Railway Express is filled
with 30 new lofts with a main entrance
that opens onto the sidewalk.
Railway Express is a transit-oriented
development: Baltimore’s Penn
Station is right across St. Paul Street.
It’s also a historic rehabilitation of a
landmark parcel post station, built in
1929. And it’s pedestrian friendly. St.
Paul is one of the city’s main streets,
and Railway Express is on the northern
edge of the Mount Vernon historic
district, within walking distance of grocery
stores, coffee shops, and entertainment
like the Lyric Opera House
and the Charles Theatre.
“The project works on many levels,”
said Ed Hord, principal with local
architecture firm Hord Coplan Macht,
Inc., and a co-developer of Railway
Express, LLC.
To rehabilitate the building, the
developers found unique solutions to
its unusual geometry, which includes
an awkwardly large, 250-by-130-foot
floor plate. More than half of the apartments
are larger than 1,500 square feet
and more than 60 feet long. The 17 feet
of space from floor to ceiling is divided
in the back of these lofts into two levels,
with the top floor left open to
receive light from the building’s big
windows.
Also, the old parcel post building is
raised to the level of St. Paul Street on
concrete stilts, which needed to be
tested for stability. It’s usually done by
installing temporary tanks, filling them
with water, and measuring any change
of the columns. Instead, the confident
developers had tons of drywall delivered
to the building. The columns handled
the weight well, and “at the end of
the day we had drywall,” said Hord.
Twenty-two of the apartments are
occupied and rent for an average of
$1.38 per square foot per month, said
Hord. On the lower level, 16 commercial
spaces totaling 37,000 square feet
are fully rented to small businesses for
an average of $17.50 per square foot a
year. The developers also fit 86 parking
spaces on the lower level, for a total of
153 spaces. That’s more than enough
for the Railway Express renters; the
developers are leasing 41 additional
spaces at $180 per month per space.
Railway Express had several layers
of financing. The $19.7 million project
took in $1.8 million from the sale of
federal New Markets Tax Credits, $3.3
million from the sale of federal historic
rehabilitation tax credits, and
$2.5 million from the sale of state historic
tax credits. The developers also
put up $2 million of their own equity
and took out a $6.5 million permanent
mortgage.
The tax credits lowered the amount
of debt the project needed to take on,
but also committed the developers to
nine-and-a-half months of construction.
Railway Express opened in
December. |
