The Development Team...to date

209 Capitol Street will be occupied on the first and second floor by Bailey and Glasser who now occupy the building known locally as The Scott Drug Building at 227 Capitol and lease space in another nearby building. I was contacted shortly after they had made an offer on this building to Charleston Urban Renewal who had purchased the building from the W. B. Geary Trust several years ago I believe so it would not be demolished and become a parking lot. Good job by CURA.

I think I was initially hired to help B&G determine how much it would cost them to renovate the building (based on my experience in my former life as the founder of a major WV construction company Pray Construction Company. Too, I knew Ben Bailey fairly well as Pray Construction designed and built the Bowles/Rice building in Charleston in 1996 where both Brian Glasser and Ben and their partner Chuck Little worked) and that engagement pretty quickly morphed into the preparation of a proforma for the development projects. Once the first run of the proforma was completed, it became clear that the financial success of the project depended on the project being awarded tax credits by the State and Federal government, so that led to the engagement of Bastian and Harris Architects to assist with many of the technical aspects of the preparation of the submission to the State historian and the Department of the Interior.

As the design emerged in response to the firm’s program of requirements as well as the requirements of the Department of the Interior, I decided to engage the architectural firm of GBBN from Cincinnati that I was familiar with due to our shared experience at Soaring Eagle Lodge at Snowshoe Resort.

Of course, one wants to be reasonably well assured that the design is not going down a path that is not responsive to our construction budget, so I negotiated a pre-construction services agreement with Pray Construction which more or less completed the initial team.

So….to date the team includes Bailey and Glasser (owners), PrayWorks (development manager), GBBN and Bastian and Harris (architects), Pray Construction (contractors).

Many more team members to follow....it takes a village…right?