Front Exterior View

Friday, January 23, 2009

Great Strides!






Hello Gang,
Hope you are well. It's the exciting part of the restoration process where you can start seeing the physical changes. We are preparing to open our doors April 1st! This past week we have been wrestling with paint colors. We decided on a color that is as close as we can get of the red it is now.

Please feel free to come on by and see the location and if you know of anyone that needs office space- we have great prices and availability.

Thanks!
Wendy

Sunday, January 11, 2009

Random Thoughts






Hello Friends,
Just wanted to share a couple of fun pictures. saw a beautiful, double rainbow from my current office last week. Plus a picture of me and two of the Carpe Diem gang hanging out at the building. Have a GREAT week!

Now the renovations are coming right along!






Hello Friends,
Hope you are well. It's amazing that after months of preparation and hard work with little to show how now things are coming right along. We have been having a lot of masonry work done. As the building is close to 100 years old, there has been areas that need some more support. Chuck, my business partner and the general contractor came up with a beautiful way to secure the back wall which was in serious disrepair.

Besides the masonry- we have been working on the heating and air units which are going to be great.

Please let me know if you want to come see the building. We look forward to sharing it with the community!
Thanks,
Wendy

Thursday, January 8, 2009

Herald Sun Article.


Thank you Monica for your support, we appreciate it.

Duo transforming blight into might

Christine T. Nguyen/ The Herald-Sun

Wendy Clark (left) and Chuck Lewis, of Lewis & Clark Community Developers, are renovating a building on Gilbert Street into a center for small businesses and nonprofit organizations. The duo is putting $1.2 million into the renovations, and they hope to welcome tenants on March. 1.

BY MONICA CHEN : The Herald-Sunmchen@heraldsun.com

Dec 26, 2008 DURHAM -- From hosiery mill, to a farmer's cooperative, to a Hispanic nightclub. And by this spring, small-business owner Wendy Clark and real estate developer Chuck Lewis are hoping a blighted, 91-year-old building near the Cleveland-Holloway neighborhood will become a busy small business and nonprofit center, home to burgeoning ventures and a host of workshops enriching the local entrepreneurial community.

In September, Clark and Lewis purchased the 14,500-square-foot building at 801 Gilbert St. for $275,000. As Lewis & Clark Community Developers LLC, they are putting $1.2 million into the renovations. It'll be a speedy process. Upfitting began on Dec. 1. Working with Raleigh architect Andy Lawrence, the pair is building open spaces on the main floor, with walls that open to the roof above. An exhibit space will be in the lobby. By March 1, they hope the building will welcome its first tenants. Less than one-third of the building has been leased.

Clark, 34, comes into the project with ample knowledge of the difficulties of starting a small business and keeping it alive. She founded her business, Carpe Diem Cleaning Inc. with just $100 and three clients when she was only 20 years old. Steadily, she has grown it to what it is today, with 18 employees and a client roster of 350 homes and businesses. Along the business's 15-year history, Clark has hit numerous speed bumps, one of which several years ago cost her dearly in reparations. For the past seven years, she has also lived in Northeast Central Durham and made combatting poverty a priority in her life. Clark knew Lewis from King's Park International Church and convinced him to help in the project. "I thought about how I could support other people in business," she said. "The more a dollar passes through a community, the wealthier a community is."

The building will include a meeting space with 90-person capacity that Clark envisions could be used by churches on the weekends and host networking and entrepreneurial workshops during the week. Rents will be kept low. Office rents range from $295 to $595 a month for 180-430 square feet, which includes wireless access, work center, conference rooms, and rental storage and multipurpose rooms. Clark's own Carpe Diem offices will be in the center after moving from the Snow Building, a Gothic, art deco structure on Main Street that is currently being renovated by three Duke University alumni. Clark said the cost of her office space at the Snow Building was going to double from about $700 to more than $1,400 this year.

Businesses have shown a voracious appetite for office space in downtown Durham, and the demand has kept up with renovations inside the square-mile area. Total office space has increased from less than 2 million square feet in 1998 to slightly less than 3 million square feet in 2008, according to Karnes Research Co. Meanwhile, occupancy rate has remained high, at between 86 and 94 percent in the same period. The typical 250-square-foot office suite is now leasing for $495 a month at the Snow Building, according to one of the partners.

The Gilbert Street building could not be put on the National Register of Historic Places, an unfortunate result of a fire that ended its days as a Hispanic nightclub. The fire burned down the roof, which then was replaced and became a "foundation" in a sense for the renovations. However, Lewis & Clark was able to secure a commercial revitalization grant of $177,000 from the city of Durham and secure the rest of the financing from BB&T.

"We're trying to create space that will be under the market, for entrepreneurs just starting out, just trying to move that Web site business from their home to a more legitimate space," Lewis said. "We feel like it's a good opportunity for businesses and local people to either start up something or something that would serve the community and thereby reinvest in that area."


The building will be named the John O'Daniel Business Center, and will be nestled among other industrial/office buildings, including the Food Bank of Durham, TROSA and the Triangle Brewing Co.

O'Daniel was one of the earliest African-American landowners in Hayti. The building was built around 1917 as a hosiery mill and purchased in 1919 by Julian Carr, who named it for O'Daniel, his "right-hand man" and former Carr family slave. According to Lewis & Clark, O'Daniel likely handled for Carr the recruitment and hiring of black mill employees, a rare practice at the time. After Carr's death, the building became The Farmers' Exchange, a farmers' cooperative with 900 members by 1935. Small businesses thrived there in "curb markets," where goods such as chickens, eggs, baked and pickled goods, and vegetables were sold.

Clark hopes to increase communication between nonprofits and businesses at the center and eventually combine the two business models into something that could benefit the community. "I love blighted buildings. I love seeing something and being able to create something," Clark said.
© 2008 by The Durham Herald Company. All rights reserved