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Two old office buildings, the Arcade and Chemical at Eighth and Olive streets downtown, were in the early stages of transformation to luxury condos and apartments when the credit crisis slammed their doors shut.

While the Chemical Building’s owners say their project remains alive, one of the Arcade’s former owners said a renovation plan for the building is, for now, "deader than a doornail."

The former owner, St. Louis developer Keith Barket, said the sluggish for-sale housing market has slowed even more in the last six months.

"Everybody is thinking apartments today," he said.

That includes the Chemical’s owners. Rob McRitchie, a partner of Los Angeles-based Civitas Development, said the company’s revised Chemical plan reduces or eliminates condos in favor of apartments. He said he hopes major construction begins this spring despite the "moving target" of the project’s amount of bank financing. Regardless, the project survives, he said.

"I can say for 100 percent certain the project is not dead," McRitchie said. "I work on it every day. That baby is going."

Across the intersection, interior demolition of the Arcade was going strong in 2007 when huge debt and the slumping housing market began grinding away at the owner, Pyramid Construction Inc., then the leader in residential construction downtown.

The company collapsed last spring, forcing lenders to take control of projects other developers were unwilling to assume. Work halted at the Arcade, where wind-tattered plastic over upper-floor windows are among the few signs work had begun to convert it and its companion, the Wright building, into about 125 condos and a hotel.

Pyramid also had intended to restore the building’s ornate arcade, which was downtown’s shopping mall in the 1920s, when streetcars on Olive carried thousands of people through a thriving thicket of high rises.

By 1982, when baseball fans clogged Olive to cheer the Cardinals during their World Series victory parade, the Chemical was losing office tenants and the Arcade was largely vacant.

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Both continued to languish until this decade, when the boom in downtown living arrived full force in St payday loans. Louis.

< The Arcade sits at the corner of 8th Street and Olive Street with tarps hanging from the windows.

In 2006, Civitas bought the Chemical building, renamed it the Alexa and began taking deposits on the dozens of luxury condos it planned to build on many of the stately brick building’s 17 floors. Pyramid announced its Arcade project, which included a 4,000-square-foot penthouse priced at nearly $1.6 million.

McRitchie said the revised, $22 million Alexa project might include only one or two floors of condos while most of the remaining space is used for apartments.

"If it’s all rental, it will be closer to 80 units and a little less if condos are involved," McRitchie said.

Plans include second- and third-floor offices above ground-floor retail space. Some parking in the building will be included but a previous plan for an automated garage to move cars mechanically likely is out.

McRitchie said the Alexa owners are resolving a lien, for $197,555, filed in November by the project’s architect, Rosemann & Associates, for design work. A Rosemann spokeswoman agreed the matter is getting worked out, adding the firm continues to work on the project. McRitchie said the Alexa owners are returning security deposits for condo reservations.

Paul Langlois, a faculty member at Washington University School of Medicine, reserved a 14th-floor condo at the Alexa for $5,000 in August 2007.

Langlois, 71, said he encountered "a lot of unanswered questions" early last year about the residence’s design and the pace of construction. He expects his deposit to be returned.

Barket, one of the Arcade’s former owners, said the worst recession in decades and the financial overextension of Pyramid and its president, John Steffen, did in the Arcade’s transformation.

"The Arcade eventually will be a prime candidate for what Steffen had in mind," Barket said.

"When the banks get tired of holding this stuff, people will start coming out of the woods. Maybe one of them will be me."

tbryant@post-dispatch.com | 314-340-8206

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