Here’s how a USC volleyball player helped save Vista fire station

On weekends in the fall and spring, Virginia commercial real estate investor Jon Wheeler traveled to Columbia for several years to watch his daughter, Paige, play volleyball for the University of South Carolina.

Paige Wheeler was a star defender for the Gamecocks, first for the indoor team and then as a member of the beach volleyball team after USC added that sport in 2014. At 5-foot-7, she was known for digging out spikes, and her diving style earned her the nickname “Flying Squirrel.”

Jon Wheeler always stayed in the Hilton Columbia Center hotel in the Vista during the six years that Paige played and then coached at USC. His room often overlooked the abandoned Columbia Fire Department Headquarters building at the corner of Park and Senate streets, which was built in 1950 and closed in the mid-1990s.

“I would look out the window and wonder, ‘Why is that not going?’ ” he said from his Wheeler Real Estate Investment Trust office in Virginia Beach. “So I made a cold call (to then-owner Tom Prioreschi). That cold call turned into a response. And it was one of the smoothest transactions we’ve ever done.”

Wheeler purchased the building from Prioreschi in July 2015 for $2.5 million, and is investing another $5 million into the structure. He is the founder and chairman of the real estate trust, which owns and manages 74 retail centers and grocery stores in 12 states.

Wheeler’s father went to the U.S. Naval Academy and his grandfather was a sheriff in Oklahoma. So the building appealed to him from a public service as well as a business perspective.

Historic preservation “is a little out of our norm,” Wheeler said. “But it’s still retail.”

Two new restaurants are planned for the historic building, one will be called Kao Thai Cuisine, a sister restaurant to the Tamarind in Asheville, N.C., and another that has yet to be disclosed. There is also room for a third restaurant or boutique, Wheeler said.

The building should be available for the restaurants by the end of this year or beginning of next.

Also, in a second phase, Wheeler said he would like to add a boutique hotel on the back half of the property that fronts Park Street. He would require, however, that the distinctive training tower be preserved.

“The fire tower is not going anywhere,” Wheeler said.

An eye for potential

Paige Wheeler graduated from USC in the spring of 2016 with a master’s degree in sports and entertainment management. She since has since earned another master’s degree in digital marketing while playing volleyball for Northumbria University in Newcastle, England.

“We never really knew” he was planning on buying the fire station, Paige said Friday as she was having lunch with in Tampa, Fla., with her fiance’, Taylor Widener, a former Gamecock baseball pitcher drafted by the New York Yankees. “But my dad has an eye for seeing potential.”

“I’m really excited to see what goes up there,” she said.

Wheeler also owns two strip malls in Lexington and Batesburg-Leesville, as well as the buildings that house Piggly Wiggly and Long’s Drugs on Devine Street in Columbia – deals he said were separate from Paige’s connection with USC.

“We’ve got the highest concentration of properties – 34 – in South Carolina,” he said. “But we did shop at the Social Pig,” referring to the Devine Street Piggly Wiggly.

Paige’s connections to the university have also led Wheeler to make a significant contribution to the annual Tunnel to Towers Run that honors firefighters and others who died in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Paige interned for three years with its chairman, Dan Hennigan.

“He has a passion for first responders and the military,” Hennigan said. “That meshed well with the fire station.”

And USC Athletics Director Ray Tanner credited Wheeler with helping to launch the university’s beach volleyball program through a “significant” gift to build the sand stadium now called Wheeler Beach.

“We were able to build a very nice facility in a very short amount of time,” he said. “The sport is now in the NCAA, and the team made the final eight this year. It would be very difficult to make that progress without the impactful gift from the Wheelers.”

Paige said she is anxious to see the finished Fire Department Headquarters project.

She and Widener “always talk about coming back for football games,” Paige said. “And I could see myself moving back down south. But I’m really excited to see how (the fire station) is going to turn out. I know he‘s going to do a really good job.”

Wheeler said that he’s enjoyed leaving a footprint on Columbia’s development. But it wouldn’t have happened without his daughter’s passion for USC.

“It’s her footprint, too,” he said.

This story was originally published July 14, 2017 at 3:46 PM with the headline "Here’s how a USC volleyball player helped save Vista fire station."