Atlantic Place is in the midst of a $3-million facelift that could lay to rest its reputation as the ugliest building in downtown St. John’s.

On the renovation to-do list is the installation of glass panels on the first two floors of the office building, a deck facing the harbor, a larger front entrance on Water Street and an expanded food court. Demolition of the old food court is scheduled to begin today.

The target date for completing the renovations is Dec. 31, if all goes as planned. Charlie Oliver, chairman of Martek Morgan Finch Icn., publicaly unveiled the new Atlantic Place look in the main lobby of the building Thursday afternoon. “The ugly box downtown is about to change,” he said in an interview. “You’ll get some life and some liveliness going on with the place, which it needs after all these years.”

Renovations began last month on the second floor where new tenant, Nubody’s Fitness Centre, is slated to occupy 22,000 square feet of space. “There’s no big fitness center downtown,” Oliver said. “It’s one that’s got panoramic views of Water Street and the harbour and The Narrows and so on.”

Part of that view will come from a large window spanning two storeys and facing the harbour. “You’ll be able to see the top of Southside Hills,” Oliver said. “It’ll be bright.”

Other new tenants include Statistics Canada, AKCS Partnership, Cora’s restaurant specializing in mid-priced breakfast and brunch, and an unnamed oil company that will occupy 25,000 square feet on the seventh floor.

That company is most likely Chevron Canada Resources, the lead partner in the revived Hebron-Ben Navis oilfield, although Oliver isn’t saying. The new tenants will give Atlantic Place and it’s 360,000 square feet of space 90 percent occupancy.

Halifax based Southwest Properties headed by Jim Spatz bought Atlantic Place last September. At that time, The Telegram reported the purchase price at $9.9 million.

Oliver said the company has helped attract a new tenant mix in the building. “That’s what Jim Spatz and Southwest try to do – they try to create a very friendly lifestyle environment.”

“If we have fitness feel and a healthy food feel then the tenants in the building are going to be happier working here…and it acts as a way to attract people to come to the building.”

“It’s a benefit to the downtown core.”

Spatx, chairman and CEO of Southwest, first saw Atlantic Place more than two years ago during a business trip to St. John’s. “I just happened to walk in and said to myself, ‘Wow… what a dim, dark, mean entrance for such a big, big building.”

At the time, Spatz was preoccupied with selling a Nova Scotia property, Sunnyside Mall, so he made a mental note to check out Atlantic Place later.

The office building became Southwest’s first property in Newfoundland. “Now that we’re here we’re looking for other opportunities … St. John’s has enormous potential going forward.”

Spatz is well-aquainted with the reputation of the oft-criticized Atlantic Place, which was built in the early 1970’s amid protests by community, heritage and arts groups. “It’s the only thing I’ve heard since I came to St. John’s,” he said. “It needed some TLC and we love applying TLC.”

“We love to buy buildings that don’t work terrifically well and make them work a lot better. From the moment we saw the building, we knew it needed lots of change.”

The payoff for Southwest is adding more tenants to the food court and filling vacant space. Southwest, a family business started by Spatz’s father more than 50 years ago, owns 1,200 apartments in Halifax, including the Bishop’s Landing waterfront condominium-retail development.

The company started breathing new life into tired old buildings about 18 years ago when it bought Sunnyside Mall in Bedford, N.S. “It was in much, much more desperate shape than Atlantic Place is today,” Spatz said. “It was both an economic success for us, but it was also helping to create a retail heart to that community, which was a great community that just had a dead mall in the middle of it.”

Since then, the company has bought a half-dozen similar properties.

The overhaul at Atlantic Place is the work of architect John Hearn, who has also designed St. John’s airport and the new Inco Innovation center in th eold TSC building at MUN. Hearn is working with Gervais Harding Associations, a Montreal retail architect firm. Marco Construction is overseeing the renovations.

Moria Baird. The Telegram, Friday, July 8, 2005