Ice House Lofts remain a possibility, someday

GREELEY – The residential possibilities in downtown Greeley are nowhere near rivaling those of Denver’s historic Lower Downtown district. But one entrepreneur, who recently abandoned a plan to turn his 100-year-old brick bunker of a building into loft apartments, can envision a day when there may be more similarities than differences.

It all starts at the Ice House.

No, not the Ice Haus, the fancy new skating center that opened in downtown Greeley last year. We’re talking about the century-old Ice House, the building on the northeast corner of Sixth Avenue and 12th Street that since its original use has lived through incarnations as a rendering plant, machine shop and industrial catchall.

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When father-and-son business team John and Jay Revard bought the 33,000-square-foot, three-story building a couple of years ago for $300,000 – a price that works out to $9 per square foot – their first inclination was to redevelop it as a loft project.

“I’ll bet we went through more than 100 lofts in (Denver’s) LoDo, looking at possibilities,” Jay Revard said. “It’s just a humongous building, and it’s got great views.”

They also worked a year to make the Ice House more, well, presentable.

“There were about 15 shacks that had been built up around the building,” Revard said. “It took us a year to tear them all down and haul them away. We must have taken 200 dump-truck loads of concrete out of there. … The building itself was full of stuff. The things we found inside – it was just amazing – all the old machinery. We took 280,000 pounds of steel out of the building.”

Once the cleanup was done, more than a year ago, the Revards approached Greeley’s planning department with a conceptual loft proposal. They say they didn’t find much encouragement.

“They weren’t at all enthusiastic about it,” Revard said. “They wanted us to pave the city streets on three sides. That was kind of a shock. We have 100 years of tax records on that building. They’ve never not been paid.”

During the past year, the district that surrounds the Ice House has been designated by the city for redevelopment, with incentives in place to renovate properties located in a swath between the railroad tracks and the U.S. Highway 85 bypass, and stretching north from 16th Street to the Poudre River.

The Sunrise Park Neighborhood Study area, as the district is known, presents new opportunities that the Revards might want to investigate, said Becky Safarik, director Greeley’s Community Development Department.

“In a way, it could be that John was just ahead of the curve,” Safarik said. “They would have to do quite a bit just to get it to the point that it could be occupied, but I don’t know that it’s at all out of the question to do that. There are some historically valuable properties that are in industrial zones that would be good candidates for redevelopment.”

For now, the Revards are using the Ice House to house Rocky Mountain Records Management Inc., a business that provides secure, off-site storage, cataloging and retrieval for business and other records.

“We’ve got medical practices, architects, engineers,” Revard said. “We try to make it like Fort Knox. It’s a very secure place.”

But Revard said he and his father still hold out hope that conversion of the Ice House for residential use might be in the cards.

“For now, it’s a story of something that might yet come to be,” Revard said. “One day, we’ll build the historic Greeley Ice House Lofts.”

News editor Tom Hacker covers real estate for the Northern Colorado Business Report. He can be reached at (970) 221-5400, ext. 223, or at thacker@ncbr.com.