My neighbor Kent Mauck has a talent – his wife calls it a curse – for restoring older, underappreciated commercial buildings.

By underappreciated, I mean buildings that no one else wants, like the two-story storefront at 612 Locust St. It was on the market for seven years before Mauck bought it last summer from Iowa State Bank for $200,000.

That particular building has a lot of history. It was built by turn-of-the century theater owners as a nickelodeon, called the Nickeldom. Commuters paid 5 cents to watch early moving pictures while they waited for the trolley.

Later, during the 1920s when the Equitable Building was going up next door, 612 Locust was converted to a full-blown movie theater, which the A.H. Blank family bought and operated as the Strand Theater until 1953.

Frankel’s clothing store, a Des Moines institution for more than a century, occupied the storefront until 1986. Many metro area men now in their 50s and older, including myself, bought their first suits at Frankel’s.

Eventually, Iowa State Bank acquired the building and turned it into a branch office.

The bank wanted more than a million dollars when it listed the property in 2005, but without any other takers, it finally sold it to Mauck. The sale made sense for the bank. There is only one tenant, a dentist who occupies less than 20 percent of the leasable space.

The building is near the center of the old downtown financial district where there is about a million square feet of space for rent.

Attracting new tenants will require some truly creative vision.

That’s where Mauck comes in. He’s a designer turned real estate entrepreneur. A friend used to joke that Mauck only bought buildings that had been in a fire or that had trees growing through the roof.

The best example is the Kenyon Building at 301 Grand Ave., which had been in a fire before Mauck purchased it in 1999 for $150,000. It was built in 1907, two years after the Nickeldom Theater, and was converted midcentury into an auto showroom before winding up as a warehouse.

It’s an odd-shaped building with windows that allow sidewalk pedestrians to look down into what is now work space.

Mauck got architects from RDG Planning & Design interested in the building and with their help, and their firm as the tenant, was able to convert the Kenyon Building into a unique form of high-tech commercial loft space.

He’d like to do something similar with 612 Locust, where skywalk access and the immediate neighborhood significantly increase the options.

Mauck wants to lease the main floor to a design firm or some other creative business, while finding a retail tenant to join the dentist on the skywalk level.

“With the skywalk connection, we’re just a few steps away from Friedrichs (coffee kiosk) and Palmer’s Deli,” Mauck said.

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the building is its basement, which was home to a series of restaurants, including The Palms and Moran’s Cafeteria. Evidence of The Palms abounds on the well-preserved plaster ceilings, columns and walls, which are adorned with medallions and panels of nymphs at play.

Several nearby early-20th-century office buildings, including the Equitable and Des Moines buildings, are being converted to housing. Mauck believes that once they are finished, his basement at 612 Locust will make a great 1940s-style restaurant for nearby residents, reachable by skywalk or street level.

Or he could grow a tree on the roof.

ElbertNote:
Kent Mauck is seeking people with additional knowledge of past uses of the building at 612 Locust St. Contact him at kmauck@flyinghippo.com