by Bradley Parsons
Staff Writer
The Ambassador Hotel’s owner wants to take the 81-year-old building back to its glory days but he’ll need City money to make it happen.
The Julia Street building has been in Samuel Easton’s family since 1971. In that span it’s served alternatively as a 120-room hotel and apartment building. Using historic photos as a guide, Easton wants to restore the building as closely as possible to its 1920s-era grandeur. Planned for five floors of market-rate apartments sitting on top of ground-floor retail, the building would serve as centerpiece for a block-long restoration project.
But historical renovation costs, particularly when restoring a building like the Ambassador that has sat vacant for four years. Easton estimates it will cost $10 million to gut and restore the building, modernize its mechanics and satisfy safety codes. Easton is applying for low-interest Housing and Urban Development loans to pay about 70 percent of the cost. He’s counting on federal tax incentives and about $1.5 million from the City’s Historical Redevelopment Trust Fund to pay for the rest.
Easton faces competition for the Trust Fund money. OUR Properties wants money for the Holmes Block on Bay Street and aspiring historic redevelopers from Bay Street to Brooklyn have shown interest in dipping into the Fund’s $3 million balance. Currently, the Ambassador and Holmes Block projects are the only applications under consideration at the Jacksonville Economic Development Commission, and Easton is confident that his project fits with the City’s plans for downtown. He said he was encouraged to apply for the money by Downtown Development Authority Managing Director Al Battle.
“We’re talking about restoring and reopening a historic building that has been vacant. We want to do mixed-use development and we want to build residential development,” said Easton. “I feel like we have a building as good as any I know about.”
Easton said his apartments would rent for around downtown market rates, another City priority. The apartments would rent for about $1.25 per square- foot. Federal requirements attached to historical redevelopment tax credits would require him to keep the property as rentals for five years. After that, he would sell the units, he said.
The Ambassador would be a central feature of a block-long project that would deposit a pair of office towers and a 456-car garage one block west of City Hall. If he can’t get the subsidies, Easton said the Ambassador would likely be torn down to make way for the rest of the development. It’s a choice he hopes he doesn’t have to make.
“It’s not just a business decision for me, I’m emotionally attached to the building as well,” said Easton. “It’s been in my family since 1971.”