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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.”

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.

Landrieu unveils cultural districts in New Orleans, Tammany

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The Times-Picayune, December 5, 2008

There currently aren’t enough businesses along the St. Claude Avenue corridor to attract the new residents needed for the area recover and thrive.  But Robyn Blanpied hopes a new tax credit program will help to change that.

Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu unveiled the Louisiana Cultural Districts Initiative on Thursday, a program that provides tax breaks to art gallery operators and owners of historic buildings in 17 New Orleans neighborhoods and five sections of St. Tammany Parish, among other parts of the state.

Blanpied sees the program as a catalyst for the redevelopment of abandoned buildings in the Bywater and Marigny neighborhoods.

“It will give us the critical mass to make St. Claude a success,” said Blanpied, who is manager of St. Claude Avenue Main Street, a revitalization program.  “Things like this will encourage people to at least come down here and give us a look.”

That is also what Landrieu had in mind when he backed the bill establishing the tax breaks in 2007.  The Cultural Districts program is run by the state Department of Culture Recreation and Tourism, which Landrieu oversees. The initiative fits with his office’s push to use Louisiana’s culture to generate economic development.

“We’ve been trying to get policymakers in New Orleans to see that they have to treat culture like any other business in the state,” Landrieu said.  “Culture means jobs.  Jobs make Louisiana not only a great place to visit, but to live.”

Property owners in the cultural districts are eligible for state income tax credits for rehabilitating historic residential and commercial buildings, defined as those more than 50 years old.  Galleries in the districts do not have to charge state sales tax on original works of art.

In New Orleans, the districts include Oak Street, Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard and the Rampart-Basin Street corridor.  Four areas, the Lower 9th Ward, Gentilly-Pontchartrain Park, Lincoln Beach and Viet Village, were added after City Council members Cynthia Willard-Lewis and Cynthia Hedge-Morrell complained that the 13 original districts included none in eastern New Orleans and just one in Gentilly.

In St. Tammany, the districts include Olde Town Cultural District in Slidell. A list of additional cultural districts will be announced in March.

“It doesn’t save the neighborhood overnight, but it will attract residents and investors,” said Greg Ensslen, president of the Freret Business and Property Owners Association and director of the Freret Market.  “It’s simply a tool to get more money for your projects.”

Ensslen said he hopes more local investors than outside developers will take advantage of the development opportunities.

Lynnette Colin of the Oretha Castle Haley Merchants and Business Association is looking forward not only to what property development could mean for the corridor, which is recovering in fits and starts, but also to venues like the Ashe Cultural Arts Center that sell original artwork.

“This helps bring people into our areas,” Colin said.  “And it will help the artists to sell many of their original works.”

Eventually, Landrieu said, he envisions that the Cultural Districts will redevelop in the same way that Julia Street in the Warehouse District and Magazine Street have.

“Those streets reinvented themselves,” Landrieu said.  “As you’re building neighborhoods, they have to have an anchor.  This is it.”

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