Moline Preservation Society Awards: Alsene Flats
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By Alma Gaul | Monday, May 19, 2008 |
(Photo by Jeff Cook/Quad-City Times) David Wise sits in front of Sundeen Flats, where he is building two apartments and space for the new location of the Café Fresh restaurant. Buy this Photo
There’s something about a dilapidated building that catches David Wise’s eye. Something about the history of it, and its potential.
Wise has purchased historic homes in Davenport and Rock Island and now has entered the commercial realm, buying and restoring a pair of vacant, turn-of-the-19th-century buildings on the west end of Moline’s downtown business district. They are on 13th Street between 4th and 5th avenues.
One building is dubbed Alsene Flats, after Swedish storekeeper Charles Alsene. The ground floor remains empty, waiting for a tenant, but the second and third floors have been renovated into three luxury apartments that are rented.
For his restoration efforts, Wise, 39, of Rock Island, will receive one of six awards Wednesday from the Moline Preservation Society in ceremonies at Butterworth Center.
The apartments in Alsene Flats are among the latest in a series of downtown living projects that have been undertaken in the Quad-Cities in the last several years.
Although the upper floors of the building had always been living quarters (in the early days, the families of the ground level businesses lived there), Wise reconfigured and rebuilt them.
In the largest unit, Wise removed a bedroom on the second floor and on the third floor immediately above it to create a spacious, two-story foyer with a staircase. The red oak banister was replicated from the banister found elsewhere in the building.
The kitchens feature granite countertops, rock backsplashes and stainless steel appliances. The bathrooms have granite countertops, vessel-style sinks and rain-head showers. Floors are a combination of wood and porcelain tile.
While granite and stainless are expensive, these finishing touches amounted to less than 3 percent of the overall project, Wise said.
One of the unexpected expenses Wise encountered was the need to rebuild the apartments’ wrought iron exterior balconies. The original railings were too short to meet today’s building codes, so contractors removed them, custom-built new extensions for the bottoms, and raised the entire railings to a level that met code.
“This is exactly the type of adaptive reuse that is making Moline’s downtown the envy of other cities,” a representative of the preservation society said of Wise’s work on Alsene Flats.
“The apartments are the type of housing that is needed to keep people downtown and encourage pedestrian traffic to Moline’s stores, restaurants, banks and other businesses.”
Other projects
The other building Wise purchased is immediately south of Alsene and is dubbed Sundeen Flats, after storekeeper Fred Sundeen. The exterior is already restored, with copper shingles on the turret and new green paint, and Wise hopes to have the interior work finished by August.
The ground floor will be a restaurant — Café Fresh, currently located at 1711 5th Ave. — and the upper floor will be two apartments.
Together, work on the Alsene and Sundeen Flats cost about $1.2 million, financed with a combination of public and private money — a traditional bank loan, historic preservation tax credits and help from the city, Wise said.
The historic preservation tax credits were crucial, and Wise’s buildings weren’t significant enough by themselves to earn the qualifying preservation status. But when combined with 111 other buildings in the downtown they could receive the designation.
How that designation came about is another preservation story. Barb Sandberg, chairperson of the Moline Historic Preservation Commission, invested 270 hours in compiling a nomination petition for the National Register of Historic Places to designate the entire downtown a historic district. The designation was confirmed in August.
Wise has other plans for the future.
He hopes to continue buying and restoring buildings all the way down the block to the west, and he expects to build a brand-new condominium project called Victorian Green to the south and east of Alsene on 6th Avenue.
Plans for that project are making their way through the city council and the city’s plan commission.
Alma Gaul can be contacted at (563) 383-2324 or agaul@qctimes.com.
EDITOR’S NOTE
In celebration of National Historic Preservation Month, we are presenting three sets of stories saluting preservation efforts in the Quad-Cities. Today is Moline; next Sunday will be Scott County. Rock Island was profiled May 4.
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