Fleetwood Building ready for business tenants, apartment dwellers

They have rebuilt it. Now the long-vacant Fleetwood Coffee building in downtown Chattanooga is ready for apartment-dwellers and businesses to come.

Renovation work is done on the five-story, more than 100-year-old, brick-and-wood building at 11th and King streets that - until the 1970s - was home to a coffee roasting company.

Tenants already have moved into about half of the studio, one- and two-bedroom apartments that take up the top three floors.

"The demographic is probably mid-20s to mid-30s. It's young people who want to live downtown. Most of them work downtown," said the man who oversaw the building's renovation, Gerald McCormick, a real estate broker for Stone Fort Properties and the Republican majority leader in the Tennessee State House of Representatives.

Talks are under way, he said, for some high-profile tenants to move into the office space on the first and second floors.

"They're very familiar names," McCormick said of the potential tenants, whose identities, he said, may be announced, "hopefully, in the next 30 days."

While the apartments have gleaming stainless steel appliances and other up-to-the-minute details, the interior still displays the building's old bones, including the hand-hewn timber columns - towering tree trunks logged from virgin forests - that run from the ground floor to the roof.

People who are eyeing the first two floors as office space like the look of the old timber columns, said Hodgen Mainda, vice president of Noon Development LLC, which owns the building.

"A lot of folks are really excited about the open floor plan," Mainda added.

Noon Development's primary owner is John Foy, a developer and venture capitalist who retired in 2012 as chief financial officer for CBL & Associates Properties Inc., after 44 years with the shopping center development firm.

The renovated building's interior is an improvement, McCormick and Mainda said, from the starting point when the window openings were covered with warped plywood, pigeons lived inside and all the floors had rotted because the roof leaked for years.

During renovations, workers removed the hardwood floors on every level. When the demolition crew finished, all that was left inside the brick building were wood columns and beams.

"You could see the skeleton all the way up," McCormick said.

Contact staff writer Tim Omarzu at tomarzu @timesfreepress.com or www.facebook.com/MeetsForBusiness or twitter.com/meetforbusiness or 423-757-6651.