Developers Green Coast Enterprises and Crescent City Community Land Trust received an $18.6 million building permit for the redevelopment of 234 Loyola Street on October 19.

The project includes the an entire residential, retail, and commercial redevelopment of the nine-story, 107-year-old building.   Financing for the project recently closed, and construction is set to begin next week.

 Green Coast purchased the building for $4.8 million in 2014 from local investor Lou Tabloo. ERG Enterprises is one of the investors on the development.

The development will include 69 one-and two-bedroom market rate and lower-income apartments on the upper floors and roughly 40,000 square feet of commercial space on the ground floor and mezzanine area.  Even though the closing just occurred last week, Green Coast actually began working on the project last year.

Commercial tenants will include a 20,000-square-foot public market similar to St. Roch and Dryades Public Market, a physical therapy center, and a health care clinic.

Studio WTA is the architect and designer and Landis Construction is the general contractor.

The building dates back to 1909 when it was built by Samuel L. Green for the Colored Knights of Pythias, a Late 19th/Early 20th Century fraternal order that grew out of a Civil War era organization. Mr. Green was reputed to be the richest African-American in New Orleans, and perhaps in the country.  The building became the home of the Knights of Pythias, and was later used as a jazz hall, a community theater and offices for companies that Pythian knights operated.

In the 1940s, it became a wartime hiring office for Andrew Jackson Higgins, who built the Higgins boats that President Eisenhower famously said “won the war.” Higgins hired men and women of all races through a single personnel office, one of the first times this had occurred in the South. The top floor was a double-height dance hall where soldiers and sailors danced and enjoyed live New Orleans music before shipping out to fight in WWII.

Check out the website for development here.

 

 

 

Related Posts

• 

  $35 Million, 162-Key Cambria Suites To Hold Grand Opening

• 

  Green Coast Names Jackie Dadakis New COO

• 

  Check Out The New Troubadour Hotel With A Tour From The...