Vintage WB facade to face wrecking ball; developer to salvage pieces for new hotel

WILKES-BARRE — Progress prevailed over preservation with the unsuccessful effort to incorporate the facade of a more than century-old building into a new hotel in the works on South Main Street.

Cost was the determining factor in whether the front of the Frank Clark jeweler building would be saved and made part of the five-story, 102-room hotel Sphere International LLC has planned for the site.

Larry Newman, executive director of the downtown revitalization organization, the Diamond City Partnership, was among those who met with Sphere president Hitesh Patel this week as part of an agreement they had to explore what options were available to preserve the facade while demolition was underway.

The talks did not produce the result Newman desired — an outcome he knew was possible, even with a $35,000 Facade Grant on the table from the DCP and the Downtown Residents’ Association.

“They said it was too expensive to preserve the facade of the building in place,” Newman said Thursday.

“We did go into it knowing this,” Newman added.

Demolition has resumed on the building after it had been stopped for a while. The work began in the rear on June 8 and proceeded toward South Main Street, as promised by Patel to the groups supporting the facade preservation. The front would be left standing to give the project team time to work on the design development and alternatives for the facade preservation.

The plan going forward is to salvage as many of the historic elements of the 1913 building as possible and attempt to include them in the Avid Hotel, said Newman and attorney Jack Dean, who represent Flemington, New Jersey-based Sphere.

“He (Patel) has committed to making that effort,” Newman said.

The rendering of the project displayed at the groundbreaking earlier this month showed a modern, L-shaped building with sharp lines and large windows for each room. It differed in size and design from the 10-story structure first proposed for the site in 2015 and estimated to cost $28 million.

Dean had said the footprint is smaller due to the developer not being able to acquire the Place 1 at the Hollywood, a former women’s clothing store, in the middle of the site. The Sphere project will be built around it in phases, beginning with the hotel followed by the second phase for the property on the corner of South Main and West Northampton streets.

Regardless of what takes shape on the site, the city is losing on irreplaceable piece of its past, lamented Tony Brooks, vice chairman of Wilkes-Barre City Council and director of the Wilkes-Barre Preservation Society.

“It’s a very sad day for historic preservation,” Brooks said Friday. The Frank Clark building was the last remaining retail building of its kind in the city, he said.

“What makes a city unique is the collection of memories associated with culture, traditions and heritage of a given place. And to have that ripped out is very sad,” Brooks said.

All too often when an historic building is demolished its replacement is no match and in this case it’s “a generic corporate building that looks just like all the others,” Brooks said.

Newman, who holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in architecture and lives downtown, offered a solution.

“If people want to see this not happen again, then we need to have local protections, meaningful local protections, as they exist in pretty much in every other city in Pennsylvania and the United States,” Newman said.