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Vecino Group buys Sterling Hotel for redevelopment

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Last edited 9:19 a.m., Oct. 23, 2014

Downtown’s long-vacant Sterling Hotel will soon get new life as microefficiency apartments.

The Vecino Group LLC closed last week on a deal to purchase the property from architect Allen Casey for an undisclosed amount.

Bruce Adib-Yazdi, design and construction manager for The Vecino Group, said the company plans to spend roughly $1.8 million to convert the former hotel rooms into 350- to 400-square-foot studio apartments with shared communal spaces, such as a library, tentatively called Sterling Lofts.  

“There will be a small element of communal living, such as an area with stored large kitchen equipment like a mixer or stock pots,” he said, noting the 30 apartments will be fully furnished and include use of a small bicycle fleet. “We are not targeting students, but rather anybody who wants to live downtown, students included. This could be a place a corporation rents for an associate in town for a few months.”

Adib-Yazdi said he’s already filed for a building permit and construction bids should open in the next few weeks, with an estimated completion date of July 15 – the same time period as another Vecino Group hotel project, Sky Eleven, just across the street. Combine the 90 units in the former Woodruff building with the 30 in the Sterling and 39 in the Vecino Group’s recently completed conversion of the McDaniel building, dubbed The U, and the development company will soon own 159 apartment units at the intersection of Park Central East and Jefferson Avenue. The Vecino Group also converted the former Landmark office building around the corner, at 309 N. Jefferson Ave., into 68 affordable housing rental units dubbed The Frisco.

Springfield architecture firm Buxton Kubik Dodd Creative signed on to design the Sterling project.

“You can’t tell from the outside, but the building is really shaped like a 'U' on the inside,” Adib-Yazdi said. “The plan is an internal light well down the center into the courtyard.”

The 23,000-square-foot building is the sole remaining boarded-up structure on the downtown square’s east side. According to Springfield Business Journal archives, the Baldwin Theater burned in 1909 and the vacant land became the site of the McDaniel building and the Hotel Sansone, now known as the Sterling Hotel. The hotel was once a gathering place for Springfield society and as the late writer Jim Billings penned in 1954, “scores of the great and near-great of the sports and theatrical worlds” visited the Hotel Sansone, named for its first operator, Charles Sansone. Sansone was a friend of John T. Woodruff, who built the hotel, which opened Jan. 10, 1911.

Casey bought the Sterling Hotel for $129,000 on Nov. 28, 1998, from Howard Moore with plans to develop the structure into lofts, along with the Holland Building. A 2012 SBJ article listed the hotel on the market for $589,000.

The hotel hasn’t been used to full capacity since 1962, when it closed in response to changing times and lack of parking, according to SBJ archives. Since that time, some office and commercial activity has gone on in the building, and the lower levels have been renovated to reflect that. The upper floors are mostly original. The last tenant of the building, an engineering firm, left in 1995.

Adib-Yazdi said Vecino Group hopes to add one or two commercial tenants on the four-story building's ground floor and/or lower basement level, which is being opened up through the light well installation process.[[In-content Ad]]

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