Sun building’s new owner ponders new uses for it
The future of The Baltimore Sun’s former home on Calvert Street just north of downtown remains up in the air.
The building’s new owner said it still is evaluating the possibilities for the sprawling brick structure that spans two blocks and includes a parking garage in a third.
“We are continuing to develop plans for the future of the building,” said Parick Coggins, vice president of development for Atapco, the Baltimore-based real estate investment and management firm that bought the Sun headquarters building in May 2017. “We currently intend to develop a mixed-use concept in which we hope to include both retail and office components.”
Land records show Atapco bought the buildings at 401, 501 and 601 N. Calvert St. for just over $10 million from Chicago-based Tribune Media, a company formed after the former Tribune Co., owner of the Sun, spun off its newspapers into one company and its television stations and real estate into another.
Tribune Media, the TV-focused company, had been leasing the Calvert property to the Sun’s parent company, a firm that became known as Tronc, but the lease expired in June. The lease was extended temporarily as the newspaper built new space for reporters, editors, ad sales people and others in the building that houses the newspaper’s printing presses in Port Covington in South Baltimore, a 250-acre site currently being redeveloped into a mixed-use community that includes offices for the Baltimore-based athletic apparel company Under Armour.
The Sun recently finished moving its newsroom and other business operations out of the Calvert Street building.
Atapco joins a host of developers acquiring buildings in and around downtown, with many remade into apartments and fewer into offices and retail.
When the deal closed last year, Atapco officials didn’t rule out any of those uses on the 5 ½ acre footprint and touted the property’s location, visible from the Johns Falls Expressway and surrounded by Mercy Medical Center, the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University, Center Stage theater and several new residential buildings.