Aurora Friday celebrated a ribbon-cutting for a building reopening that almost wasn’t.
Officials admitted Friday, as they officially opened the redeveloped Hobbs Building, a 130-year-old structure at River Street and Galena Boulevard, that the margin between having the building redeveloped or torn down was about the size of a two-by-four piece of wood.
That, at least, seemed to be all that was holding up the building at one point, said David Dibo, Aurora’s economic development director. And even after the city decided to give fledgling redevelopers Jay Punukollu and Harish Ananthapadmanabhan, owners of JH Real Estate Partners LLC, a chance at the redevelopment, officials had their doubts.
“Jay called me on a Saturday, and insisted we meet,” said Dibo. “He looked at me and said, we could do this, you gotta believe, we could do this.”
At that point, Dibo called Mayor Richard Irvin and Alex Alexandrou, the city’s chief management officer, and convinced them the two deserved another chance.
“It’s not only about the numbers, and the tax credits, and all that,” Dibo said. “It really is about the human spirit, and not giving up on dreams.”
Irvin called it “a long, hard project.”
“This wasn’t easy,” he said. “Me and these brothers had some real conversations. They said, trust us, and I said, I don’t know y’all like that.”
But Irvin said Friday that four years later, “one of the most beautiful buildings in Aurora has been redeveloped.”
He added he now trusts them to do more downtown, and they hinted that it would happen. The partnership now owns 11 buildings downtown, and has other plans for the future.
“There’s history here, and they brought that history back to life for Aurora,” Irvin said.
Part of the history was restoring the onion dome on the corner of the building. It had been taken down almost six years ago when city officials feared it was a safety hazard and might fall.
The dome was so deteriorated that it could not be saved, but the city made a cast of it, so it could be recreated.
The dome was a key feature for noted architect James E. Minott when he designed the building in 1892, so much so he included one in other buildings he designed, such as the Aurora Fire Station, now the Aurora Regional Fire Museum, at Broadway and New York Street in downtown Aurora.
The Hobbs Building was built in 1892 for the Hobbs Manufacturing Co., which made furniture and coffins in the building. But it is remembered more these days as the Crosby Building because Crosby’s Sporting Goods occupied the first floor from 1952 to sometime into the 1980s.
Ald. Michael Saville, 6th Ward, said he remembered going into Crosby’s Sporting Goods with his parents, hoping they would buy him baseball or football equipment. He joked that although he has been on the City Council for 37 years, he was not at the first ribbon-cutting for the building 130 years ago.
“If there was one building people cared about, they would ask, are you going to save the building, and are you going to save the dome,” Saville said. “They did exactly that.”
Workers on Thursday battled strong winds to get the dome back in place, and it has retaken its part on the Aurora skyline, as it did for more than 100 years.
The building now stands almost complete, with most of its 33 residential apartments leased. Still to come are three restaurants on the first floor.
Ananthapadmanabhan called Friday “a momentous occasion,” and said that the city took a chance on a couple of guys who were buying properties.
“Having vision is one thing, but you have to prove you can execute,” Ananthapadmanabhan said. “We are believers in Aurora. There’s no reason we can’t get it back to what it was, and maybe even better.”
