The long and painstaking restoration of a century-old building in the shadow of the 1897 Bexar County Courthouse is nearly complete.
Built in 1915, the Legal Professional Building at 200 Main Plaza is set to open in November after more than three years of renovation work.
Delays caused by the COVID pandemic, supply chain issues and a mandate to meet preservation standards slowed progress to bring the historic building to a usable state, said Keller Henderson, president of Keller Henderson Interiors.
For decades, the four-story brick building served as the city jail, police station and health department until 1962, according to the Conservation Society of San Antonio. It sat empty until attorney David Paul Carter bought the dilapidated building from the city in 1970.
He proudly paid $42,000 for it, according to an oral history recorded in 2006.
“It’s the best $42,000 I ever spent in my life,” said Carter, who financed a ‘70s-era renovation that involved gutting the walls and repairing the roof.
Carter died in 2013, leaving the property to his son, Paul Carter, whose sister Marline Carter Lawson still remembers childhood days spent playing on the empty fourth floor and a large bat colony that occupied a corner before the building was renovated and then leased to law firms.
Investor group Witz Realty bought the building in 2015. Today, the 26,000-square-foot office building is assessed at $11 million, according to tax records.
Though the recent renovation is intended to bring modern comfort and finishes to the interior — a $4 million project, according to state filings — the outside of the building has retained its historic character.
In 2017, the city’s Historic and Design Review Commission denied Henderson’s request to replace all of the building’s mashup of windows of varying sizes and ages with modern, metal-clad windows.
That led to an effort to replicate some of the original windows that were historically accurate, Henderson said, and buy and install 99 new windows that meet today’s energy codes and maintain the historic character of the building. That process took a year due to supply chain delays.
Henderson said plans to add another level to the building for a glass-enclosed, rooftop restaurant also got nixed, a decision that made the project eligible for state historic tax credits.
“We were going to do something very contemporary … and we decided to go with historical tax credits [instead],” he said. “But in retrospect now, I’m very happy to be keeping it as a historical building in downtown San Antonio. There will be plenty of contemporary ones coming up. This will be intact.”
In May, Centro San Antonio also dressed up the building’s eastern River Walk-facing side through its Art Everywhere program with a mural, “Celebrating Joy,” by artist Joseph Ramey.
With the building “dried-in,” Henderson’s firm plans to finish the interior work and prepare the spaces for leasing to start in November.
“So far, the interest has been mostly from law firms and small tech [companies],” he said.
