Historic block
Demolition begins at KellyRamsey site, though plans still being fine-tuned.
One building has already come down, but plans for redevelopment at the downtown site anchored by the historic, fireravaged Kelly-Ramsey Block are still a work in progress.
Developer John Day had planned to build a $250-million, 29-storey office and hotel tower on the Rice-Howard Way site. It includes the MoserRyder Building that until 2012 housed Swedish Jewellers, and a neighbouring building that also faces 101st Street, south of 102nd Avenue.
The new tower, featuring 4-1/2 storeys of underground parking had been scheduled to open in early 2016. But Day said Friday he is working on changes in the design of the development.
“We had looked at doing a mixed-use building,” he said. “We’re now going to build just an office building … so we’re redoing the renderings.”
While the project’s design and timeline is still in the works, the plan is to have commercial and retail space on the main floor and offices above, he said.
The middle building on the site, which once housed a Sony Store and later, a cellphone shop, has already been torn down.
Crews are working inside the Moser-Ryder Building next door and major demolition work will start in the next few days.
That building was built in 1910 and remodelled in 1944. Its current art-deco look will not be recreated in the new development.
“What will go up there will be something that’s historically complementary to the Kelly-Ramsey historical facade,” Day said.
Work will begin later on gutting the Kelly-Ramsey Block while carefully dismantling its historical facades on the south and east sides for use on the new building, he said.
“All three (buildings) come down, but what goes back up on the Kelly-Ramsey site is historical and then the rest is intended to be either modern architecture or complementary architecture to the KellyRamsey building, so it’s all one building that goes back up on the site.”
The Kelly-Ramsey Block has been vacant since it was badly damaged by an arson fire on March 24, 2009. Michael Kevin O’Reilly, a tenant, pleaded guilty to arson last December and is scheduled to be sentenced in August.
The site was purchased from Worthington Developments by a numbered company run by Day, who has been lauded for projects that saved old structures such as the Garneau Theatre or were sensitive to their surroundings, such as turning the derelict Cecil Hotel on Jasper Avenue and 104th Street into a boutique-style Sobeys supermarket and office building in 2008.
In 2004, he replaced three burned buildings on Whyte Avenue and 104th Street with a three-storey retail building that incorporated period facades.
In an early proposal, Day originally aimed to erect a sixstorey building on the KellyRamsey site with 66 underground parking stalls, but that idea did not go ahead.