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Lofty dreams

Residents of a new development in downtown St. Petersburg will have a great view of the Fourth of July fireworks and the hustle and bustle of the city. But how exactly do you put 51/2 stories of housing on top of a seven-story parking garage?

ST. PETERSBURG - Take the elevator to the seventh floor of the McNulty garage and step out onto the rooftop parking area. Neatly spray-painted in yellow are the outlines of your future loft, overlooking downtown and Tampa Bay from Second Street between First and Second avenues S.

Stand here and see your view of the water through windows 11 feet, 4 inches high. Walk over there, into the glass-walled gallery that leads to your bedroom. Imagine sitting on your balcony watching the July 4 fireworks.

It's an exercise in imagination that the developer, Echelon Residential, hopes will give potential buyers a better idea of what the 85 lofts will look and feel like.

Another exercise in imagination is at the model center, a few blocks away at Third Avenue and Third Street S. The ground-floor space has been transformed into a loft, complete with the same spiral air-conditioning ducts, granite countertops, exposed wiring, pendant lighting and opaque glass that buyers will find in their lofts. Now picture this atop that parking garage.

Potential buyers from New York, where they know about lofts, "think the price is a steal. It's a no-brainer," said Mark Stroud, president of Echelon Real Estate Services. "It's the locals who hem and haw."

The lofts range in size from just more than 1,000 square feet to 2,700 square feet and in price from $189,000 to the mid $500,000s. More than half have been reserved.

The construction cost of the loft project (excluding the existing garage) is $17-million, Stroud said.

The other exercise in imagination is understanding how you put 51/2 stories of lofts atop a seven-story parking garage with 740 spaces.

The answer: They planned it that way.

"In 1997, Echelon International built the garage," said Tim Tinsley, president and chief executive officer of Echelon Residential, to meet the parking needs of Florida Power. (Both companies were part of Florida Progress, which has since been sold to Carolina Power & Light and is now known as Progress Energy. Echelon is now an independent, privately held entity.) "What we built was very expensive and very nice to match the existing McNulty block."

That is a complex of five brick buildings - banks, office space and the Midtown Sundries restaurant - built on the site of the city's Fire Station No. 1 and named in honor of J.T. McNulty, who was chief from 1912 to 1936. McNulty commanded 42 firefighters at five stations. Echelon recently sold the McNulty complex to a development group but retained ownership of the garage.

The garage "was designed to add four additional levels of office space when the market demanded it. But it didn't," Tinsley said.

The parking structure was built with "a beefed-up foundation," elevator cutouts and chases for electrical wiring and plumbing to accommodate "a big downtown entity with 100,000 square feet of office space," Tinsley said. "But that never worked out." Indeed, for a long time office space stood vacant and cheap downtown.

Echelon considered topping the parking structure with rental apartments, "but we couldn't get enough units out of it to make financial sense," Tinsley said.

Eventually, downtown residential "came to the forefront," Tinsley said. The McNulty structure, appropriately sized for the load and weight of four floors of office space, could easily withstand the lighter load of 51/2 floors of residential. There will be 17 units per floor, and the top floor will have 17 penthouses, 14 of whch will have second-story lofts, hence the half-story.

Dressing up the garage

A system of staggered steel trusses, 12 feet high by 60 feet long, creates the bearing walls, said architect Mike Poole of Poole & Poole Architecture in Annapolis, Md. Using the more common poured-in-place concrete walls, he said, "we would have had to go back and put temporary bracing in the existing parking deck" to accommodate wind load "and shut the deck down, or individual floors, for significant periods. The way this goes up, we're able to keep the parking structure and the restaurant open for the majority of construction."

The real challenge, Poole said, "was to get the whole thing done without having to spend an awful lot of resources on upgrading the existing building." Because the parking garage was built with the expectation that additional floors would be added, its foundation was engineered to withstand the weight. Except at tremendous expense, a project like this "wouldn't be possible if the building were not already designed for additional floors above."

Adding a structure atop an existing building "is extremely unusual. I wouldn't say it's never done; someone's done it," Poole said. "But it is an unusual premise to build on top of a parking deck. It's not done all the time, no."

Another key concern was "to keep the character of the original building and not look like we dropped a box on top of something that Echelon had spent a lot of resources on building. The big challenge of a building like this is to make it look like it belongs there and still has its own character." What passers-by will see from below is glass and precast masonry panels with brick insets that coordinate with the brick exterior of the existing garage and other buildings on the block.

Singles, mingles and jingles

So, who will live in these urban loft condominiums, which Echelon is billing as "cool" and "contemporary"?

Buyers and lookers are "mostly from St. Petersburg or south Pinellas, downtown or the beaches," saleswoman Laura C. Glover said, but some have come from Tampa and Sarasota. "Some are young couples. Some are empty-nesters who are downsizing and want something different. Some are New York-type transplants who want an upscale version of the lofts they lived in 30 years ago."

They like the industrial, urban look of exposed brick, concrete floors, uninterrupted space and stainless-steel or black appliances. Three or four are buying raw space that they'll finish to their liking. Construction should start by the end of the summer and be completed in 14 months.

That buyer profile conforms to what speakers at a recent Urban Land Institute gathering in Baltimore described as the market for in-town housing: young, childless singles and couples; older, affluent professionals; and retirees.

Downtown housing appeals to three groups "seeking the convenience and excitement of an urban lifestyle," said William H. Hudnut III, the institute's senior resident fellow, according to a summary of the proceedings. They are:

Singles, the "yet-to-commit crowd that moves first and then looks for a job."

Mingles, married with careers and possibly pets but no children.

Jingles, working or retired empty-nesters.

"Central business districts are turning into central social districts offering culture, arts and entertainment," Hudnut told the institute gathering.

That's the thinking at McNulty Lofts, where, Stroud said, "downtown is the amenity." The loft project will have a fitness club and socializing areas, but what will appeal to buyers are the restaurants, galleries, parks, waterfront and nightlife (and soon a Publix and other retail across the street on Second Avenue S at a project called University Village, and an Eckerd drugstore a block away on Third Avenue S).

There's no pool, for example, "and they're not looking for that," Stroud said.

Some buyers have purchased two adjacent units of about 1,000 square feet and plan to combine them into one unit.

And at least one buyer who works nearby had a very specific reason for his purchase: "He wanted the parking space," Stroud said. One-bedroom units come with one parking space, two-bedroom units with two. That buyer "is not necessarily planning to live there," but he'll keep the parking space so he can pull in, park his car and walk to work.

What: McNulty Lofts, 85 condo loft units

Where: 101 Second St. S, atop the seven-story McNulty parking garage.

Prices: From the $190s to the $500s.

Model center: 235 Third St. S. Open 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. weekdays, 1 to 4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday.

Information: 727 896-3400; visit www.mcnultylofts.com