THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, September 23, 1994 TAG: 9409230519
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: D1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY PATRICK K. LACKEY, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: Long : 106 lines
If you walk east from Harbor Place your eyes fill with splendor.
First you pass tourist mecca Nauticus, then Town Point Park, the expanded Waterside, the granite spire that is Dominion Tower and the parking lot with the whaling wall.
You pass under Berkley Bridge and come upon the 200-foot-long River Palace, formerly a ferry and now luxury afloat, with a disco, movie theater, swimming pool and spacious, deep-carpeted living quarters.
Ahead lies Harbor Park, perhaps the crown jewel in the city's rehabilitated waterfront. The view is joyous, maybe even postcard material - until you gaze upon the wart, a building so hideous it jolts you like a bad memory.
You cannot help but cringe in the wart's presence, surely the ugliest building in Norfolk. If it's not the ugliest, it's the city's most visible ugly building: a six-story cube of unpainted, cracked concrete that pigeons call home.
The building's most notable feature - actually its only feature - is the large white sign near the top advertising ``Oldies 95.7 . . . All Oldies All the Time.''
The building, some 600,000 cubic feet, is to ugly what dirt is to dirt. Once a thriving cold storage warehouse, it has stood empty more than a decade.
``Why is it ugly?'' asked Doran Wright, mustering all the incredulity he could. He is president of Elizabeth River Land Company in Norwalk, Conn., the wart's owner.
``It's just there,'' he said. ``It's kind of a presence. It should be an assuring icon that some things in Norfolk don't change.''
Noting the beauty and radiance of surrounding structures, Wright called the cold storage warehouse ``the missing tooth in the smile.'' He added, ``We're just waiting for the dentist.''
His company, he said, owns or controls about 6 acres between the baseball park and the Dominion Tower parking lot, between the interstate and the river.
Unfortunately the property is divided into lots, not all contiguous. Roads and small lots owned by others break it up.
The city assessor's office lists 12 lots there belonging to Wright's company, with a total assessed value of $774,880.
The wart is assessed at an added $104,370, and a small, rusting concrete and tin building nearby at $36,740. It ranks among the city's 10 worst-dressed buildings.
``No pun intended,'' Wright said, ``but we don't have any concrete plan for the cold storage building or the entire site.''
The property is not for sale, he said, ``unless the city wants to make me some offer I can't refuse.'' He is waiting, he said, for someone with both a good idea and money to join his company in developing the property.
For now he is leasing it to various marine operations and to the city of Norfolk for parking.
``We are not of a mind,'' he said, ``to simply dispose of the building or a piece of groundhere or there.''
The city both prodded and watched proudly as a string of jewels was carefully set downtown along the Elizabeth River.
The dilapidated Boush Cold Storage warehouse, for example, was transformed into Harbour Place, 84 condominiums costing up to $1 million apiece.
The wart is so aesthetically disfunctional it may be beyond transformation.
``The best use to which it could be put is demolition,'' suggested Robert B. Smithwick, the city's director of development, normally a can-do guy.
The building dates at least to the '20s, but Wright said, ``We've been led to believe the building has a lot of life left in it.''
The building's thick-walled rooms used to be kept cold, some below freezing, by brine forced through pipes in the ceilings.
At various times, Wright said, there have been discussions of transforming the building into a nightclub, a sports bar, a restaurant or a jazz club.
Reportedly there were discussions several years ago of making the area residential, but nothing came of them.
When real estate appraiser H. Glenn James was asked recently about the ugliest building in Norfolk, he said, ``You mean the Jones Cold Storage building.'' Asked how he knew which building the reporter meant, he said, ``Because it's the ugliest building in Hampton Roads.''
James, a partner in Graham and James Associates, a Norfolk commercial appraisal firm, doubted anything would be done to the property soon. ``It's going to sit and be the ugliest building in Hampton Roads until economic forces come into play to make it viable to do something to it.''
Pluses to the property, he said, are that it's on the water downtown with easy access by road. ``Waterfront property is at a premium,'' he noted. Also, he said, surrounding property has been developed, ``so the natural inclination is, `Let's do something with it.' ''
But there are minuses, he said: the property is broken into parts, the shoreline is a mess of debris, the property is on the less valuable side of the bridge, toxic waste might be present and expensive to remove, the building would be expensive to demolish, if that were necessary.
Wright, the owner, said he would settle for nothing less than a grand idea for the property, something worthy of the neighborhood.
``Grand ideas take grand dollars," he said, ``and I don't know where those grand dollars will come from. The upshot is, I don't see it going anywhere soon.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
JIM WALKER/Staff
Once a thriving cold storage warehouse, the Jones Cold Storage
building has been empty for more than a decade.
by CNB