The Downtown Chatham Centre in Chatham, Ont. is getting a major facelift and will be a prime example of renovating a tired 1980s shopping venue and repurposing it to blend into a historical streetscape.
The conversion will also add to similar developments downtown, led by the five-storey Retro Suites boutique hotel across the street, a conversion of several legacy buildings when it opened in 2016.
Retro Suites was also the brainchild of one of the Chatham area’s prime business movers and shakers, Rob Myers, who owns the RM Classic Cars Group, which restores cars and sells them around the world.
Myers also recently purchased the former federal Paul Martin building in Windsor, which he plans to similarly convert.
Myers is one of a group of well-known local businesspeople behind the mall redevelopment, to be known as 100 King as per the street address.
The others include Myers’s daughter Jessica Myers, Don Tetrault of the Tatro Group of Companies and Ron Nydam of J.P. Holdings and J.P. Contractors.
Tetrault and Myers are also working to convert the 82-acre former Navistar truck factory into a commercial and industrial park. Nydam has restored the Sons of Kent Brewery and the Dutch Market and he owns the immediate block of buildings to the west of the mall.
No price for the conversion has been disclosed.
The partners purchased the mall a few years ago. They also put a proposal to the municipality to move civic offices, the main library and art gallery, into the 220,000-square-foot complex and specifically 97,000-square-foot former Sears store space. The municipality has welcomed the offer but hasn’t made a final decision.
Nydam, spokesman for the group, said it made sense to purchase this piece of key real estate.
“It’s been going downhill, maintenance hasn’t been kept up on it, it’s kind of a blob in the middle of our town,” he said.
So, the group bought it to “get this thing rocking and get it fixed up so it’s not such an eyesore.”
The two-storey complex was built in 1981 and is showing its age with the harder geometric surfaces and darker colours and finishes of that era.
The partners revealed a streetscape designed by Windsor-based ADA Architects that shows a totally redone exterior mimicking a traditional small-town street, which will “look like all separate buildings tied together,” along 600 feet of frontage, Nydam said.
“We want to recreate some of the lost history by creating older looking facades — different heights, projections, materials, just to recreate what that area at one time might have looked like.”
There will also be a two-storey residential component added to create a living-work continuity.
On the interior they will resurface the floors and brighten the darker brick colours, repaint the ceiling and change railing colours, install new escalators and a new elevator. The terrazzo floors will be stripped and refinished.
The expectation is also to fill several vacant units. Work is already underway to expand space for a pediatric clinic.
Exterior and general interior renovations will start this fall taking 18 to 24 months.
There are a few challenges. The mall was built on caissons because there were once old buildings there.
“We have to do a core test for the new foundations and check the bearing weights of the underlying soils and then that will help develop the structural plans,” Nydam said.
“But one of the biggest things would be getting the right look and then working that into the structural details to support the added wind load and weights.”
Nydam’s companies own and are restoring more than a dozen local buildings and did most of the work on the Retro Suites Hotel.
But wider than that its portfolio includes having built and refurbished hundreds of fast-food restaurants including McDonald’s, KFC and Taco Bells as far afield as Saskatchewan.
His interest in historic renovation grew out of curiosity as he travelled to worksites from town to town.
“I guess it’s because of the workmanship that happens on a lot of the buildings in the 1800s and early 1900s,” he said. “To see that really impresses me, the amount of time they put into that, quality, all the intricate stone and metal work. I believe that when a building looks amazing it attracts a certain clientele or tenants, and when it’s well-maintained it retains that clientele.”
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