Financing woes delay start of Kiel work
The tough commercial lending market has forced a delay in the renovation of the Kiel Opera House, a spokesman for David Checketts said Monday.
The show will still go on, said Eric Gelfand, a senior vice president at SCP Worldwide, the Checketts-owned firm that is spearheading the $74 million project. But not until the spring of 2011, about six months after the grand hall was originally planned to reopen.
The tight lending market has kept SCP and its partners from finding nearly $15 million that they need to borrow to fund the deal, and thus from being able to float $29 million in tax-backed bonds that St. Louis legislators authorized earlier this year.
"We haven’t been able to secure the banking commitments that we’ve needed thus far," Gelfand said. "The economy has majorly affected our efforts to do that."
It’s not a big surprise.
SCP originally said it wanted to start construction in September, to have the long-empty Kiel ready for a 2010 holiday season opening of "How the Grinch Stole Christmas." Two months after the projected start date, only minor cleanup work has been done.
And financing troubles have stalled all sorts of projects all over St. Louis, from Ballpark Village downtown to the Streets of St no credit check payday loan. Charles, on the west bank of the Missouri River. A report issued last month by the Urban Land Institute — a real estate think tank in Washington — suggested that commercial lending will pick up in 2010, but only for the strongest projects.
This summer, when it pursued city approvals to renovate the Kiel, SCP expressed confidence it could close a deal despite the economy. It pointed to its track record rehabbing New York’s Radio City Music Hall and other theaters, and the relatively small size of this project. Yet talks with dozens of banks in St. Louis, SCP’s hometown of New York, and elsewhere have so far yielded too little cash to get off the ground.
They are close, Gelfand said. And they still plan to finish the job along with partners McEagle Properties and Paric Corp. But the timing to try and start this fall was "completely bad."
"We feel pretty confident that we’ll be there and able to open in the spring of 2011," Gelfand said. "Our belief in this project remains steadfast."
Filed under: legal by Wolf