Babcock Building dome to rise again after funds secured for renovation after fire
The red dome of the Babcock Building will rise again above the BullStreet District in Columbia.
After a devastating fire in September destroyed the historic cupola and threatened the long-awaited redevelopment of the 254,000-square-foot building into what will be a centerpiece of the sprawling commercial district, the future of the Babcock Building is back on track.
Developer Clachan Properties announced Thursday that it officially secured a $39 million federal housing loan and federal historic tax credits that were essential to fund the 135-year-old building’s conversion into 208 apartments with amenities. The project is expected to cost about $55 million in total.
With funding now in place, the first phase of the Babcock Building is expected to open to residents by early 2022. The project is expected to be fully completed within three years.
The fate of the Babcock Building, which once housed mentally ill patients of the South Carolina Lunatic Asylum, was questioned after the building went up in flames three months ago. Firefighters worked for hours to extinguish the blaze, which Columbia Fire Chief Aubrey Jenkins said was the “largest structure fire we’ve had in several years.”
It was the second fire at the historic building in the span of two years, causing much more extensive damage than the first in 2018. The causes of both fires are still unknown.
Because the September fire damaged several historic features, developers were hopeful but unsure that funding and tax credits could still be secured through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The funding depended on the building’s status as a historic structure.
“After determining that no one was hurt in the fire, our biggest concern was the eligibility of the project for federal historic tax credits, which are a major source of capital for the project, as well as the added costs and scope of work that was were unanticipated,” Hugh Shytle, president of Clachan Properties, said in a news release Thursday. “But we worked our way through the process with the National Park Service, State Historic Preservation Office and HUD, and everyone concluded that, thanks to the Fire Department’s heroic work, the essential historic elements of the building were left intact and the project could be salvaged.”
The most recent conflagration consumed the building’s iconic red dome, or cupola, which was so much a part of the Columbia skyline that visitors sometimes mistook it for the S.C. State House. The image of the dome is even used in marketing materials for the BullStreet District.
New renderings of the Babcock Building apartments confirm the cupola will be replicated atop the newly restored building.
Developers and the city have invested tens of millions of dollars in the 181-acre BullStreet development and have worked tediously to preserve a number of historic buildings, including Babcock, on the former asylum campus.
The sprawling Babcock Building was built in stages beginning in 1858 and completed in 1885. The Renaissance revival-styled building covers 254,022 square feet and has 1,100 windows and 20-inch thick masonry walls.
Its last patients left around 1991, and since then it has suffered damage from time and weather, in addition to the two fires.
Clachan Properties owns the building and has been working for more than four years to start turning it into apartments.
This story was originally published December 17, 2020 at 9:00 AM.
