A long-vacant office building in downtown Little Rock is undergoing a mixed-use makeover dominated by apartments. Workers are transforming the upper floors of the 13,110-SF building at 319 W. Second St. into 18 residential units.
“We’re leaning towards calling it Pyramid Lofts,” said Jacob Chi, owner-developer of the project.
The $3.8 million redevelopment is reconfiguring the seven-story building into four studio apartments each on the second and third floors, three one-bedroom apartments each on the fourth-sixth floors and one two-bedroom apartment on the top floor.
Numbers are still getting crunched to establish the rental rates, Chi said. “We’re shooting for the upper end of the market,” he added.
The first floor is earmarked for an Asian eatery. Exactly what flavor from the Chi family’s menu of restaurants has yet to be determined.
“The family is currently developing a new restaurant concept that will utilize the Chi’s name,” Chi said. “We are studying whether to put that concept into this space, as it provides a lower wait time in serving the guest.
“Our other consideration is to place a Chi’s Express location, which is more of a quick-service version of our Chi’s Chinese restaurant locations we’ve opened in the past. Either way, there will be a Chi family restaurant occupying the ground floor.”
New Market tax credits through Little Rock’s Heartland Renaissance Fund provided $1.7 million to help finance construction. “The tax credit funding makes this project feasible,” Chi said.
Asbestos abatement was finished earlier, the interior elevator and stairs are gone and seismic remodeling work is nearing completion.
The earthquake prep work involves strengthening the concrete and brick bones of the building with the addition of more steel: strapping on columns, tube bracing on interior walls and fasteners tying the masonry into exterior and interior plates.
“We’re going to spend a million dollars in seismic work alone,” said Manly Roberts, president of Little Rock’s AMR Construction LLC.
The general contracting firm is overseeing construction that currently includes foundation work on the new elevator-stair tower on the west side of the building and interior wall framing for apartments. Plumbing, electrical and interior finish-out are poised to begin.
“We’d like to finish by Thanksgiving or Christmas, sometime around then,” Chi said.
The Pyramid Lofts name under consideration represents a historical throwback to the “Pyramid Life” that literally crowned the building in giant lettering when it opened in 1928.
Ten years later, Pyramid Life Insurance Co. moved a block east to 221 W. Second St., known today as Pyramid Place.
Pyramid Life’s former home at 319 W. Second was owned by a succession of insurance ventures: Insurance Carriers of Arkansas in 1938, Southern National in 1941, Investors Preferred Life in 1962 and finally Paramount Life in 1972.
The office building was home to a string of lawyers over the years before it went dark with vacancies more than a decade ago.
The property is still known by some as the Paramount Life Building though its longtime owner and main occupant moved to west Little Rock years back in the 1980s. Chi stepped into the ownership picture in 2015, six years after Paramount Life exited.
“As the owner, you’re a custodian of time,” Chi said. “This building is almost 100 years old, and we want to help make it stick around another 100 years.”
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