Historic Indy Building Gets New Facade
The complicated process of renovating the historic Litho Press building in Indianapolis passed another milestone this week with the completed restoration of the building’s façade. Initially planned as a three or four part of the overall renovation, the façade work actually took about six months. When complete, the building will offer 111 apartments and be called 800 North Capitol Apartments.
By Dees Stribling, Contributing Editor
Indianapolis—The complicated process of renovating the historic Litho Press building in Indianapolis passed another milestone this week with the completed restoration of the building’s façade. Initially planned as a three or four part of the overall renovation, the façade work actually took about six months. When complete, the building will offer 111 apartments and be called 800 North Capitol Apartments.
TWG Development and Ambrose Property Group, the developers, tasked Western Construction Group to restore the deteriorated exterior of the building, a major part of the overall redevelopment. According to Western, the job took about 8,800 hours, 3,500 bags of cement bag mix material and thousands of pounds of steel and lumber when demolition uncovered more severe deterioration than originally anticipated.
Western used a combination of scissor lifts and articulating booms to complete the exterior building repairs. Western removed the deteriorated concrete, replaced the steel reinforcements as needed, formed individual patches and poured back mix material using five-gallon buckets.
The property is known as the Litho Press building, but that company only moved into it about 60 years ago; the structure has a much longer history than that. It previously housing offices and production for Kahn Tailoring Co., once a large name in men’s clothes (Kahn merged into Globe Tailoring of Cincinnati in 1954 and didn’t need the Indy space any more).
Most recently, the Indianapolis Repertory Theatre had been used the building for storage. The developers bought the structure late in 2012 from the Jack and Nancy Lacy Irrevocable Trust for about $2.5 million.
The project qualified for $2 million in affordable-housing tax credits, and investors and the developer put equity into the project. Another part of its funding was through $2 million in National Park Service tax credits, and to receive them, the developers had to preserve much of the 130,000-square-foot structure. Historic details that were left intact include a large stairwell and a walk-in safe original to the building.
