Initially, people thought
that we were crazy for wanting to turn an
abandoned baseball stadium into apartments. There were 2,000 cash for
clunker cars parked on the infield. Four foot high
weeds and 15 year old trees were growing up in the
infield. Because the property hadn't
been used as a baseball stadium in quite a long
time. Hi. Welcome to Stadium Lofts
in Indianapolis, Indiana. I'm Michael Cox and I'm 54
years old. I'm John Watson and I'm 65
years old. We took an abandoned
baseball stadium that the city of Indianapolis gave
us for $1 and turned it into 138 apartment units. Wow wow wow wow wow. There are four owners of the
project. It's myself, my two sons,
and Michael. My youngest son was a
development associate and worked for us at the time. My older son is a passive
investor. I was the board chair of
Indiana Landmarks, a not for profit historic
preservation organization, and we were postulating
ideas as to what could be done with Bush Stadium. About nine months later,
after we had come up with a few ideas, they approached
me again and said, if you don't do that idea you came
up with to turn it into apartments, it's going to
be lost. They're going to tear it
down. So we put together a team and explored whether
or not it was possible to do it. The city's goal was
bigger than ours. We were looking to do an
apartment project. The city's goal was to
create a catalyst for the neighborhood and to stretch
downtown beyond its current boundaries. As well as save an historic
baseball stadium that had a lot of history in
Indianapolis. As a condition of
transferring the property to us, the city mandated that
we build an additional 144 units outside of the
stadium. Those units were built in
four separate buildings adjacent to the stadium. The profits from the project
are split proportionally based on the ownership of
the individual partners. The cash flows from this
project have been used to create other projects that
we've done as well, as we're constantly reinvesting back
in this project to maintain it as a great place to
live. When we first saw the
stadium, we were excited about the potential of the
project. We were a little
apprehensive of could it really be done? Our biggest concern when we
started this project was who was going to show up and
rent it. There wasn't much housing
in the neighborhood. There wasn't much economic
activity in the neighborhood. We were kind
of pioneers when we did this project, and so we were
concerned about its success and we underwrote it very
conservatively. Bush Stadium, from a
technical standpoint, was probably the most difficult
project that we've done in terms of solving the
construction and engineering issues that needed to be
resolved in order to be able to build the project while
maintaining the character of the building, and also
while turning it into apartment units people
would want to live in. In the renovation, we wanted
it to be stadium like. We didn't want to take all
the stadium character away, so we designed it such that
when you walked into the stadium, you felt like you
were walking into a historic stadium rather than an
apartment building. We retained the billboards
that were in the outfield, the brick wall that was in
the outfield, the scoreboard. We retained the
infield, and we put back the base paths in concrete to
kind of pay homage to what was here before. In
addition, we saved the press box on top of the third
floor of the building. Doesn't serve a real
function anymore, but it is there because it was. Another interesting feature
that we saved were the ticket booths at the front
of the stadium. So as you walk up to the
front door, you still see the old ticket booths with
the metal grating in them, and those areas are now
inside apartments as closets. The budget for
renovating Bush Stadium into apartments was about $14
million, and we stayed within budget. The original construction
loans have long been paid off and they've been
replaced with long term permanent financing. The Stadium Flats project
was built about two years after the Stadium Lofts
project was completed. At that time. When we
opened, all of those were fully leased as well. The overall development cost
of the Stadium flats portion of the project was about
$13 million. As you walk into the stadium
from the outside, you're walking towards the ticket
booths that were original to the outside of the
building. As you pass through the front door, you
walk into the underside of the stadium, still being
visible. Hi, come on in to one of our
study rooms. So we have three studying
rooms here and they're located under the
grandstand. So we have high ceilings
all the way up to the old grandstand. Lots of open
space and lots of light. Come check out our fitness
center. The fitness center is
another one of the spaces we built under the grandstand
here. We have spaces for cardio,
whether it be treadmills or bikes, free weights. And down on the end, we
have another space to do personal workouts with a
bench and dumbbells. Also in the fitness room,
we have further sort of accented our decorating by
putting some images from the old stadium on the windows. The last space we
constructed under the grandstand is our bullpen. Originally this was a
conference room. You can also see in the
bullpen we have old ticket gates where the turnstiles
used to be. We left installed and built
walls in and around them. We also built a courtyard
for our residents to hang out in. Come on in. In the courtyard, which is
adjacent to the field, we built a gas fireplace,
tables and chairs, and a nice place for people to
hang out. Welcome to section 304 of
Stadium Lofts. We have all the
conventional amenities full kitchen with stainless
appliances, granite countertops, washer dryer,
two bedrooms, two bathrooms and then we were able to
expose the steel trusses and tongue and groove decking
of the original roof of the stadium. One of the
unconventional things we did was we exposed all the
concrete floors in the units. We poured new
concrete and then polished it for a finished floor. When we did the balconies,
we wanted them to feel like you were at the stadium. So we used chain link
fencing for the railings to create that stadium type
appeal. For me, completing this
project I found really satisfying. In one way. It was the culmination of a
childhood dream. I played baseball growing
up, and I always thought maybe I'd get into the Hall
of Fame as a baseball player. When we opened the project,
we did tours. There was a tremendous
amount of interest by people in Indianapolis coming to
tour this project, because almost everybody had been
here for a baseball game sometime during their
lifetime, and many people, this was the first
experience they had going to a baseball game with their
dad. So the connections were deep and people couldn't
wait to come to the project. The neighborhood and the
public and the city were all ecstatic that we were able
to save the building and bring some new housing to
this neighborhood.