Durant Hotel

[ZachariahDaMan]

To see more pictures of the Durant hotel go to http://photobucket.com/albums/v605/nailhed/Flint/

A hobby of mine is going to abandoned places and I plan on going there someday.

[VeeFan]

Welcome to the forum!

Thanks for the pictures, they're very good. Anyone know what the original color of the interior was? Were the columns brown, or is that something that's happened from not being maintained?

[Allan]

I think you'll find that a few of us on the forum have the same hobby.

The Durant is only about 11 miles north of my house. It's a building I've been meaning to explore, but I usually end up in Detroit. Tomorrow is Detroit exploration day...maybe if my attempts at getting into the skyscrapers I'm targeting there fail....

[Allan]

VeeFan, the columns appear to be a brownish or redish marble. It's hard to tell from the photos. The low light levels in there certainly don't help either.

I'm actually surprised not to see more water damage. The building looks to be in good shape (at least as far as abandoned buildings go).

[dnast]

Those are probably the best pictures I've seen of the interior. Thanks for sharing, Zack! Welcome to the forum.

[wolverine]

Great Photos. The lobby is amazing. I would hate to see this building get losts.

I too have taken much interest in exploring abandoned buildings. I think it's more important than ever to document these buildings through photography.

[badrotation]

As for the tunnels, there is in fact a tunnel connected to the building.

Many of the buildings in the downtown 'strip' have utility/freight tunnels. A few years back, I was given the oppertunity to take a tour of the downtown tunnel system. It is quite amazing how many buildings are connected, and how good the tunnels look to this day.

Most of the buildings have metal gates blocking access to the tunnels, but for the tour, alot of the gates were unlocked with cooperation of the landowners.

[ZachariahDaMan]

Can anyone take a tour of them? That would be really neat to do.

[Pachuco]

So who owns the Durant hotel, Al Kloss or the Oddysey Group, I'm gonna call Daystar and ask about it's future and if they ever will develop it.

[Allan]

Daystar owns it. They have a history of proposing developments & never following through. Think of the Ferris Fur Building & the Dryden Building Lofts. Daystar seems to be Flint's resident slumlord. He just buys buildings and sits on them until it is profitable for him to either sell them or develop them.

There appears to be a sizeable tree growing on the roof now. It's nothing like the 25 foot tall tree that's growing on the roof of the Fort-Shelby Hotel in Detroit, but it's tall enough to be seen from the street.

[Pachuco]

Daystar owns it.

[Allan]

Hmm....apparently the Odyssey Group does own it & it was never sold to Daystar. Newspapers always tend to jump the gun on things like this. I did some online searching and found a tidbit that was posted June 3, 2005. All it said was that the hotel had been sold, but no development details had been released.

Other than that, all I can find is this, and it's bordering on two years old.

Demolishing the Durant Hotel would be a real loss for downtown. It has so much potential - potential that a parking lot or vacant lot will never have. It makes a nice bookend for downtown. If only they could renovate it....

[Pachuco]

Hmm....apparently the Odyssey Group does own it & it was never sold to Daystar.  Newspapers always tend to jump the gun on things like this.  I did some online searching and found a tidbit that was posted June 3, 2005.  All it said was that the hotel had been sold, but no development details had been released. 

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Now was it sold to Odyssey or Odyssey sold it ? What search engine did you use ?

[Allan]

It was given to Odyssey by the guy who owns Genesee Towers. Odyssey sold it.

I only use google...I haven't used any other search engine in years....

[Allan]

[ZachariahDaMan]

I love the old picture. Do you know when it was taken?

[Allan]

I believe it was taken in 1930, but I don't know for sure. The Northbank Center was completed in 1923, & they took out the streetcar lines in 1935, so it was definately somewhere in that timeframe.

I noticed earlier that you asked a question about the tunnels. The tunnels are technically closed to the public. That said, I've found what appears to be a tunnel in the basement of the Durant. I didn't go very far alone though, so I don't know for sure. I need to find someone who's brave enough to go with me. I will do buildings alone, but I don't like doing basements alone....

[wolverine]

I might be able to head down to Flint sometime this week and explore the Durant

[dnast]

Here's an excerpt from an article from last year in the East Village Magazine

The fifth building in the downtown area acquired by Kloss

[Pachuco]

In the river town strategy it mentioned plans to convert the durant and Berridge hotel into condos, now take into mind that this is off July 2005, so I think something is really gonna happen.

[VeeFan]

But plans to convert the Durant into residential have been around forever; one of the most recent ones I remember was in 2003, and where has that gone since then?

I won't believe it until I see work starting on it, or a developer is actually named and details are actually available.

[Allan]

I have to agree with VeeFan on this one.

The master plan says that the Durant will be converted into residential. However, The building has been offered to both U of M-Flint and Uptown developments, and both have turned the offer down.

The problem is that there currently isn't a significant demand for that amount of space downtown. The residential market downtown is just getting started. Converting the building into lofts now will totally saturate the market. At this point, I doubt a residential conversion would be profitable for a developer. The only way to do this would be if the city would be willing to step in and provide gap funding, and I just don't see the city doing that.

So then you start looking into other uses....

Well, the demand for new office space downtown isn't there. Renovating it into office space would put a massive glut of office space on the market. Besides, the building is old and companies today want large open floorplans, not a plan with structural support columns every 10 feet.

The hotel market downtown isn't exactly booming either. Just look at the Character Inn, or whatever that place is called these days. On a typical night I bet that place is less than 1/3 occupied. How that place is staying open is beyond me. Typically new hotels look for a nightly occupancy rate of at least 50-60% when they are considering building a new hotel in an area. Converting the Durant back into a hotel could be done, but it wouldn't be long before either the Durant or the Character Inn went under. The Durant originally had 300 rooms. If you double the size of each room (the old hotel rooms are big enough for a bed and that's about it), you'll have 150 more hotel rooms on a market that can barely support what's there now.

So residential is out...office use is out...hotel is out. What to do?

The only way to make it work is do find the right combination of uses in some sort of a mixed use development. A hotel/residential development might work under the right circumstances. A office/hotel development is less likely, but it too might work. Even then, does the building even lend itself to mixed use? Somehow I don't see a massive mixed use development happening here anytime soon either...Flint just isn't progressive enough.

Now there are only two options left:

1) Properly mothball the building and hope that the building's renovation will one day become profitable. Keeping a building mothballed properly costs quite a bit of money, and you've still got issues with trespassers and vandals. And the decayed look of the building isn't going away either...many people would consider it an eyesore and would wonder what they're going to do with "that crappy old building".

2) Pay to have it demolished. It will cost more than the initial cost of mothballing it, but it'll cost less in the long run. It's one less building to worry about redeveloping or keeping sealed from vandals and bums. The "eyesore" will be erased off the downtown landscape, and will be replaced with a bland, ugly asphalt parking lot that will provide the land's owner with a hefty profit.

Say you tear down the building and build a parking lot with 250 spaces and charge $5 per day to park there. Pay someone minimum wage to sit in the booth and collect money from people. If that lot fills up, it will gross at least $1250 that day. If it fills up Monday through Friday every week out of the year, the lot would gross $325,000 per year! The outcry from various historic groups and people who remember when the hotel was the grandest hotel in the city is the only reason why the hotel has not been turned into a parking lot already. Unfortunately, I fear that the parking lot scenario is the most likely scenario unless things improve dramatically in the next 5-10 years. The building has been vacant since 1973...that's 32 years! It can't sit vacant forever.

[Pachuco]

I think if someone converted it into a mixed use development, with say the 2 bottom floors occupied with commercial use, the 4th floor with like a fitness room,andresidential lofts, let's sat they knock down 2 walls for every room and there is a 100 lofts, I wouldn't be surprised if the building was at full occupancy in less than a year. I think it would make developers and people think twice about downtown and start ivesting more into the area. I also think it would quickly change downtown's perception and encourage buisinessmen and residents to lease space there, which would add to the momentum. Do you remember when University Parks, or Rosewood Riverside home were built, they were sold like that ! Allan, Flint is very progressive, take a bike or car ride and look.

[RustTown]

But, developers are going to try and put as many units into a redevelopment project as they can. And they won't do that until the demand warrants. Turning and entire huge floor into a fitness room wouldn't help pay off the money it cost to refurbish the building. It's simple economics, really, that can be the most frustrating to us dreamers.

[Allan]

The desire for people to live downtown is just begining to become apparent. Banks don't like to lend in situations such as these unless they know for a fact that there is a market that exists for this type of project. They call these types of projects "high risk". Flint is an untested market. The first wave of lofts are just getting completed, and none of the projects currently in the works are even close to the scale that the Durant redevelopment would be. We're looking at something more than twice the size of First Street Lofts. Once the banks are convinced that First Street Lofts has been successful, they will be more willing to lend more to a developer who wants to renovate the Durant.

Even if converting the building into lofts is determined to be feasible, making the building profitable for a developer could prove impossible. Based on the costs of similar renovations that have happened in Detroit, the cost to renovate the building will probably be somewhere around $200 per square foot. The problem is that it would impossible to lease or sell space at that price in downtown Flint. If you've got a 1000 square foot loft that you're trying to sell as a condo, you've got to recoup that cost somehow. The developer would have to charge at least $200 per square foot to make a profit. I don't see anyone plunking down $200,000+ for a 1000 square foot loft in downtown Flint. The developer could charge less than that, but then there would be that gap that exists between the cost of renovation and the amount the developer would make on the project. It is this funding gap that has sunk every hope of renovating the building so far. A few years ago the cost to renovate would've been $11 million. The only way the developer could've done it was if the city gave the developer $3 million to fill in that funding gap. The city said they weren't going to do it, so the project died. I have a feeling that the same thing would happen today. Today the project is in the $14-15 million range, more than twice the cost of the First Street Loft conversion.

Maybe I should rephrase myself...Flint is progressive, but not nearly progressive enough.