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Downtown New Orleans’ Joy Theatre to be restored

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The Times-Picayune, July 15, 2011

The Joy Theatre, one of four historic theaters in downtown New Orleans, will reopen as a live music and entertainment venue early next year after a $5 million renovation by NOLA Theatre District LLC, the development company announced Friday.

NOLA Theatre District purchased the Canal Street theater, closed since 2003, from ESE Enterprises, a family trust with more than a dozen members, for $1.5 million after negotiating for more than two years, said Neal Hixon, a developer and partner in the development company.

“We’ve spent a long time working on this project,” said Hixon, who was a lead developer in the effort to transform the Arabella Bus Barn on Magazine Street into a Whole Foods Market. “We think it’s going to be a great addition to Canal Street.”

The Joy Theatre closed more than eight years ago, finally succumbing to the competition from megaplexes with stadium-style seating and a dozen or more screens.

When it reopens next year, it will no longer be competing with those theaters, Hixon said. The Joy will be reborn as a live music venue. The theater also will host comedy tours and be available for private functions and corporate events, Hixon said.

Current renovation plans call for keeping the theater’s exterior intact, restoring it to the way it looked on opening day in 1947, Hixon said. But the inside of the theater will be completely remodeled.

“It’s a complete gut and redo. It’s been neglected,” Hixon said. “We’re going to take it down to its bare walls.”

NOLA Theatre District LLC, a team comprising developers, Hixon and Joe Jaeger, and business owners, Allan McDonnel and Todd Trosclair, plan to use a variety of tax incentives, including state and federal historic tax credits and the Louisiana Live Performance tax credit, to complete the renovation.

McDonnel’s company, The McDonnel Group, will act as general contractor on the project. AllStar Electric, which Trosclair owns, will oversee electrical repairs. Jaeger’s The MCC Group will oversee the design and installation of the mechanical systems.

The Joy Theatre opened in 1947 at the corner of Elk Place and Canal Street and was hailed then as “New Orleans’ newest and most modern film temple.” The 1,250-seat, three-screen theater at one time contained a soundproof, glass-enclosed “crying room” for parents with babies. The theater showed first-run movies every decade since it opened, culminating with “Drumline” in 2003.

The redevelopment of the Joy will continue a recent spate of improvements to that section of Canal Street, which has spent years in decline, said Kurt Weigle, president and chief executive officer of the Downtown Development District. Weigle pointed to the 1201 Canal condominiums, directly across the street from the Joy, the recently opened New Orleans BioInnovation Center, about two blocks away and the in-repair Saenger Theatre, positioned diagonally from the Joy, as signs of improvement.

“This is part of a clear trend of revitalization,” Weigle said.

The purchase of the Joy, along with construction at the Saenger, also means two of the four historic theaters in downtown New Orleans are on the road to restoration. Efforts to renovate and reopen the other two, the Orpheum Theater and the Loews State Palace Theater, have stalled.

“We don’t expect that all four of the historic theaters along Canal Street will be brought back just as they were in their heyday,” Weigle said. “But the important thing is that they will be brought back in a way that’s going to contribute to Canal Street.”

Weigle said the Downtown Development District is working to have all four theaters reopen, each with a distinct and different purpose so they don’t cannibalize one another.

Jindal signs four-year extension of Louisiana Historic Tax Credit program

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The Times-Picayune, July 7, 2011

Standing in the art deco entryway of the iconic Saenger Theatre, Gov. Bobby Jindal on Thursday signed a pair of bills that extend tax credits for the restoration of certain historic structures, including the Canal Street performance venue.

“These historic tax credits will help us to revitalize and save this heritage of historic buildings for our children and the future,” said Jindal, who was flanked by New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, state lawmakers and members of the New Orleans City Council.

Completing a massive reconstruction of the Saenger, which opened in 1927 as a vaudeville playhouse before morphing into New Orleans’ preeminent movie palace, hinged largely on the authorization of Senate Bill 63 by Sen. Ed Murray, D-New Orleans.

“Had that piece of legislation not passed, this project probably would have shut down,” Landrieu said.

The measure extends through 2016 a program that provides income and franchise tax credits worth 25 percent of the cost of restoration projects in downtown development and “cultural products districts.”

Developers in March halted work on the $45.8 million Saenger project after investors expressed concern that the tax credit program, which had been slated to expire Dec. 31, would not be renewed.  Builders are counting on about $8 million in historic credits to restore the theater, which has been shuttered since it flooded after Hurricane Katrina.  City Hall has earmarked another $13 million in block grants for the job, with investors chipping in the balance.

In light of the uncertainty, private lenders requested that all transactions related to the project be halted until the tax credit issue was resolved.

Confident that Jindal and state lawmakers would support the extension, the city agency overseeing the renovation agreed in mid-March to advance the Saenger team $1.1 million to ensure the swift resumption of work.  Landrieu publicly backed the move by the board of the Canal Street Development Corp.

Developers anticipate closing on the entire financing package by October, with the theater expected to open in late 2012, mayoral spokesman Ryan Berni said.  Officials expect the advance payment from the development corporation to be repaid, he said.

Fifty-five projects worth an estimated $291 million — and carrying $73 million in associated tax credits — are pending under the tax credit program, state documents show.  Since it began in 2002, 124 projects have been awarded more than $135 million in tax credits.

Those projects have generated more than $650 million in investment statewide and created 11,000 construction jobs and 5,700 permanent jobs, Jindal said.

“Analysts tell us that for every $1 we invest in this program, we generate $3.22 in economic activity and revenue,” he said.

Jindal on Thursday also signed House Bill 348 by Rep. Walt Leger III, D-New Orleans, which extends to 2016 a similar tax credit program for owner-occupied residential properties.  The measure lowers from $20,000 to $10,000 the minimum qualifying rehabilitation cost and increases the credit rate to 25 percent for most projects and 50 percent to the restoration of blighted properties that date back at least a half-century.

Jindal cast the bill as a blight-fighting tool, and Brad Vogel of the local office of the National Trust for Historic Preservation called the residential tax credit “crucial” to continuing rebuilding efforts.

“As different neighborhoods pick up steam, it will help to make renovation a more viable option,” he said.

Former Belleville School to become apartments for the elderly

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The Times-Picayune, June 6, 2011

A historic and dilapidated former Algiers school is getting new life with plans to convert the long vacant building into apartments for senior citizens and the disabled.

The former Belleville School, portions of which have been in disrepair for decades, is set to undergo a $13 million renovation to create 52 assisted-living apartments. Construction could be complete by February, said Sean Arrillaga, a vice president for St. Luke’s Living Center in Algiers, one of the partners in the renovation deal.

Most apartments will be about 550 square feet, which Arrillaga said is larger than the current market average.

The group closed on the school site at 813 Pelican Ave in May, and demolition of the interior has begun, he said. Arrillaga declined to identify the other investors in the project, but said the project will qualify for state and federal historic tax credits, along with new markets tax credits.

The group decided to renovate the Belleville School because of the surrounding neighborhood, Arrillaga said. He called Algiers Point a “quaint, historic neighborhood.”

Cecelia Hemelt, who will be the administrator of the 56,000-square-foot property, said the neighborhood is a good fit.

“We really liked the location and the community of Algiers Point,” she said.

Hemelt said the apartments will be geared toward residents 55 and older or high-functioning disabled people. There will be a director of nursing on duty during the day and several aides there around the clock. All rooms will have handrails and other amenities to provide easier access.

Belleville School’s current makeover as an assisted-living facility is just the latest twist in its saga, which includes several failed redevelopments in the past two decades. The school has been vacant since 1987, and through the years developers have envisioned it as condominiums, a hotel and spa, and, in 1989, apartments for senior citizens and the disabled. The main structure of the school — a three-story, red-brick building — was completed in 1898, and wooden annexes were built in 1907 and 1925.

Skip Gallagher, the president of the Algiers Point Association, said the group is excited to finally see some action occurring at the school site after years of watching the building deteriorate. He said an assisted-living facility is one of the best uses for the building, and he doubts it will be a large drain on parking in the surrounding neighborhood, which was a concern of some residents. Gallagher said it would have been far worse if the abandoned building continued to be a blight on the Point.

“For the most part, we’re encouraged by it,” said Gallagher, adding that it’s great to see a historic building salvaged instead of demolished by neglect. “The biggest concern we had was that it wouldn’t happen. That would be criminal.”

Old Universal Furniture store morphs into the Healing Center

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The Times-Picayune, April 11, 2011

What a long, strange trip it’s been for the former home of the Universal Furniture store in Faubourg Marigny.

The run-down building, which flooded after the levee failures in 2005, had a brief but head-scratching post-Hurricane Katrina life as a temporary home for both the New Orleans Police Department’s 5th District station and the avant-garde Prospect.1 art exhibit.

Now, the one-time retail space is morphing into the New Orleans Healing Center, an eclectic, new-age development.

Spearheaded by Voodoo priestess, artist and writer Sallie Ann Glassman and her high-profile longtime companion, developer Pres Kabacoff, the site is about to become a community center where neighborhood residents can buy food from a cooperative grocery, get a micro-loan, find worship space or take a yoga class.

The $13.2 million project grew out of a series of meetings organized by Glassman and her friends after the storm. The group identified a need for a center where wellness services and amenities would be offered to those struggling to rebuild both physically and spiritually.

“We didn’t want it to be a spa or a resort in the country,”  Glassman said. “We wanted it to be integrated into the community.”

‘It just felt right’

The group chose a complex of two-story buildings that formerly housed Universal Furniture. The complex included an 1840s cornerstore and residence, a large 1926 commercial structure and a smaller commercial building, all united behind a 1960s-era metal screen that obscured the buildings’ architectural features. Situated at the corner of St. Claude and St. Roch avenues, the complex sits across from the iconic St. Roch market building.

“When we first visited the Universal building, it was dark and labyrinthine,” Glassman said. “Three buildings had been joined together and divided up. But when we went up onto the roof, all of a sudden there was this beautiful view of the city and the skyline. It just felt right.”

Kabacoff undertook the rehabilitation of the 55,000-square-foot complex independently of HRI Properties, where he is chief executive officer.

Renovation work began last May, financed by a blend of state and federal New Markets Tax Credits and historic tax credits, as well as allocations from city and state redevelopment agencies.

The exterior, where metal screens once hung, is painted in a Caribbean-inspired color palette, with bright purples, oranges and teals. Infrastructure work, including new Sheetrock, has been installed and primed, and tenants are in the process of customizing their stores.

Free barbecue, open house

To celebrate this milestone and further acquaint the public with the project, the Healing Center plans a free community barbecue and open house on Sunday, April 17, from 2 to 6 p.m.

“The Building Block should be open by then,” said Glassman, referring to a consortium of green and sustainable businesses. “Others will still be in the process of their build-outs when we have the barbecue, but will be fully open by May 1. A few others will take a little longer. So May is our soft opening and we’ll have a grand opening in July.”

In addition to Glassman’s business, Island of Salvation Botanica, which specializes in Voodoo religious supplies, medicinal herbs and Haitian artwork, the complex will house up to 20 more enterprises.

They include Fatoush Restaurant and Juice Bar; ASI Federal Credit Union; Crossroads Arts Bazaar, a place where local artists can sell their work; Wild Lotus Yoga Studio; Café Istanbul Performance Hall, a combination meeting space and performance venue; and the New Orleans Food Co-op, a 4,000-square-foot full-service grocery store. Currently, about 85 percent of the center is leased.

A long-needed grocery

Lori Burge, general manager the food co-op, said the grocery is one of the businesses that requires a longer build-out period than others because of the need to install refrigeration equipment and shelving. The store will sell fresh food to the Marigny and St. Roch neighborhoods, areas that have been without a grocery since the Robert’s market on St. Claude Avenue closed. To secure the final piece of its financing, the co-op is trying to recruit an additional 200 member-owners.

Crossroads Arts Bazaar director Lorien Bales said her gallery is timing its opening to coincide with that of the co-op.

“Foot traffic will be key,” Bales said.

Glassman believes that the Healing Center will bridge the Marigny and St. Roch neighborhoods, catalyze revitalization of the St. Claude Main Street corridor and help encourage other projects, like the resurrection of the St. Roch Market and the installation of a streetcar line.

“It’s interesting to me that the physical work on the buildings turned out to be a healing process in a way,” she said. “We took these totally neglected and sad buildings and restored the facades and opened them up and healed what had been done to them. Now everyone who visits … just feels uplifted by the open spaces and all the light.”

Louisiana CDEs predominate in latest NMTC allocation round

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The Times-Picayune, February 25, 2011

Eight Louisiana community development entities — seven headquartered in New Orleans — won nearly 10 percent of all the New Markets Tax Credits allocations announced Thursday by the Treasury Department.

The awards are intended to stimulate economic and community development and job creation in low-income communities by permitting the selected financial institutions to make loans and investment they might not otherwise be able to make.

The $310 million awarded to the eight Louisiana institutions just about equals the $316 million allocated to nine CDEs in New York City, the other biggest beneficiary.

“The New Markets Tax Credit continues to be a tool for job-creation and economic revitalization in areas that struggle to attract investment because of poverty, unemployment and lack of opportunity,” said Donna Gambrell, director of the Treasury’s Community Development Financial Institutions Fund, noting that the 2nd Congressional District’s total of $257 million was more than that being directed to any other district in the nation.

“These organizations have and will continue to demonstrate why this tool has been so effective in making literally thousands of projects possible across Louisiana and the country and give Americans a chance to make a living, to start a business and to build a better future in areas that need it most,” Gambrell said.

The allocations for the seven recipients headquartered in New Orleans are $56 million for Advantage Capital Community Development Fund; $53 million for Whitney New Markets Fund; $42 million for AMCREF Community Capital; $35 million for Liberty Financial Services; $28 million for National Cities Fund; $28 million for First NBC Community Development Fund; and $15 million for Enhanced Community Development. The eighth recipient, of $53 million, is Stonehenge Community Development, based in Baton Rouge.

“The fact that our community has the highest amount of awards in the entire nation illustrates that we’re getting it right,” said Rep. Cedric Richmond, D-New Orleans. “The 2nd Congressional District of Louisiana has the right formula for venture capitalist investment in low-income communities. We’re making great investments to rebuild our city and get our neighbors back on the jobs, and it’s working.”

Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., said the “tax credits will have a significant impact in several Louisiana neighborhoods in desperate need of investment.”

The Louisiana community development entities — a legal term describing an institution whose prime mission, and accountability, is to low-income communities — have been helped in their efforts in past years by a companion state version of the credit, the enactment of which was a top achievement of Richmond’s service in the state Legislature.

That state allocation has now been exhausted.

The New Orleans entities, most of which received awards in past rounds, also benefited in the past from the expansion of the program under the Hurricane Katrina Gulf Opportunity Zone Act, which targeted recovery efforts after the storm.

Advantage Capital, which seeks to bring venture capital where it seldom goes, has won awards in seven of the eight rounds. While the use of the tax credits by Advantage, like the others, is not limited to Louisiana, managing director Michael Johnson said that “in the neighborhood of 25 to 30 percent of our allocations have been in Louisiana, focused primarily on south Louisiana.”

Alden McDonald, Liberty’s president and CEO, said that it had received $130 million in previous allocations, which had been used almost exclusively in the New Orleans metro area post-Katrina to help rebuild Holy Cross High School as well as bring back a hotel, a funeral home, an animal hospital and other small businesses. He said the new allocation may also go to spur projects in Kansas City, Mo.; Jackson, Miss.; Baton Rouge; and Detroit, as well as New Orleans, where he said one likely project is the renovation of the Saenger Theater on Canal Street.

AMCREF Community Capital, which has been receiving the credits since 2006, will focus its new allocation on renewable energy and green manufacturing, according to its president, Cliff Kenwood.

St. Margaret’s pushes for 2012 opening of nursing home within former Mercy Hospital

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The Times-Picayune, February 8, 2011

In the next 60 days, contractors for St. Margaret’s Daughters, a Catholic church-affiliated nonprofit health-care provider, are scheduled to begin limited demolition work as part of the redevelopment of the old Lindy Boggs Medical Center in Mid-City.

The first phase of the redevelopment is a nursing facility projected to open in the summer of 2012, several months later than the target announced in April 2010 when St. Margaret’s bought the property on the corner of Bienville Street and North Jefferson Davis Parkway.

Jason Hemel, St. Margaret’s vice president for development, confirmed that his organization is in talks with a hospital operator about the yet-undetailed second phase: a small hospital. Addressing the Mid-City Neighborhood Organization this week, Hemel did not disclose the potential operator or the specifics of what kind of hospital or surgical center St. Margaret’s has in mind. He referred mostly to a “specialty hospital” and mentioned “30 to 50 beds,” but he did not explicitly rule out the possibility of a full-service hospital.

It is questionable how a full-service hospital in Mid-City would fit into a hospital market where existing hospitals like Tulane Medical Center and Touro Infirmary, to say nothing of the hundreds of additional beds that would come online with the completion of the planned University Medical Center and an eastern New Orleans hospital on the old Methodist Hospital campus.

Specialty hospitals that target customers for specific, often out-patient procedures – orthopedics, heart catheterizations – are increasingly commonplace in the U.S. health care system.

“In about six to eight months, we should have some more things to announce,” Hemel said.

St. Margaret’s executives have said that the end product would include physician offices, clinic spaces, rehabilitation services and a small surgical hospital, a complex modeled after the organization’s St. Luke’s Medical Center and St. Luke’s Living Center that opened last year in Algiers.

Hemel said St. Margaret’s also is considering a wellness center and is in discussions with a day-care provider for a facility that could serve employees and surrounding community members. “We don’t know exactly what it’s going to look like,” he said.

The demolition work will take about 45 to 60 days as architects finish the final plans for the new nursing home facilities will occupy about 100,000 square feet of what had been medical office buildings at Lindy Boggs. The entire complex is about 300,000 square feet.

Though plans are not final, Hemel said the concept envisions apartment-style rooms clustered in “neighborhoods,” rather than traditional long hallways with single and double rooms on each side. Plans call for 12 neighborhoods each with nine rooms. Each room will have its own kitchen, laundry and dining area.

“We’re trying to make it much more like being in your own home,” Hemel said, adding that St. Margaret’s executives have traveled extensively to see the same model in other cities.

The Lindy Boggs Medical Center, run by for-profit Tenet Healthcare Corp., suffered extensive flood damage from Hurricane Katrina and its levee breaches. The hospital never reopened after the flood.

Tenet sold the property to Victory Real Estate Investments, a Georgia firm that amassed several Mid-City properties with the intention of developing a Bienville retail corridor. That idea never materialized. Public records show that St. Margaret’s acquired the Lindy Boggs complex for $4.2 million.

St. Margaret’s Daughters, constituted in 1889, has been providing institutional health care since it opened a facility in the Holy Cross neighborhood in 1931. The agency’s Lower 9th Ward nursing home flooded during Katrina and has since reopened at 3419 St. Claude Avenue.

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