‘“Nine North” Brings Urban Mixed-Use to St. Louis

True, urban mixed-use development has arrived in St. Louis, thanks to Opus Northwest, LLC and St. Louis City Treasurer Larry Williams.

This pioneering project in the city's Central West End integrates residential condos, a public parking garage, and streetside retail into
what looks like a single, stylish building. The mayor's office in St. Louis named the project, dubbed Nine North by developer Opus Northwest, the "Development of the Year" in St. Louis in 2009. Located at Nine North Euclid Avenue, the $18 million facility is adjacent to Park East Tower, the high-rise condominium building also developed by Opus Northwest.

The residential condos have what Opus Director of Construction Joseph Downs calls "an urban contemporary style," with floor-to-ceiling
windows punctuating the precast brick exterior and an interior that features open floor plans combined with 10-foot ceilings, wood floors,
granite countertops, and stainless steel appliances. Each residence has a private balcony overlooking an urban garden and swimming pool built
on top of the parking garage.

"It was a challenge to design an urban, modern product that fits the context of an historical neighborhood and still strikes a chord with the
St. Louis market," Downs said. "We've found that the St. Louis market can only accept so much progression. If we were building in New York City,
we would build something a generation or two ahead of this. This has more of a homey feel to it than we would build in New York," he said.

"We characterized these units as a value purchase," Downs said "They are not luxury units, but they are not lofts; they have modern amenities,"
he said.

"We spent a lot of time talking about how to strike a chord with St. Louis; it was something we talked about every week," he added.
Opus pre-sold the first residential condo of 52 in May, and by press time had sold 28 more. The retail units also are condos. The first sold in
April and the rest sold out during the summer.

Like Park East Tower, Nine North began as a parking lot. Both projects have increased residential and consumer density in one of the city's most vibrant neighborhoods without sacrificing any existing buildings or traditional streetscape. The parking lot that occupied the site of Nine North was owned by the city.

Downs said that the city treasurer's office, which operates city owned parking lots, was the main catalyst for this project. "They really pushed it
forward," he said.

The city retained ownership of the land and contracted with Opus to design and build a garage, which the city would own. Opus bought the air rights above the city property for condos, Downs explained. The finished facility has three ownership entities: the City of St. Louis, a retail condo association, and a residential condo association.

"We have reciprocal easements, common and shared mechanical and electrical systems, and common and shared property management and snow removal," Downs said.

"This maybe unusual for St. Louis, but we've done deals like this elsewhere. This is what we consider a typical urban, mixed-use project," he said. That familiarity with the legal underpinnings of such projects helped pave the way for this one.

"The ability to articulate the ownership arrangement and how the pieces would work together was the key not just to getting the project off the ground, but also to making it explainable to prospective buyers," said Downs.

Structurally, the garage is post-tensioned concrete while the condos use a metal truss and joist system.

Gateway Panel, Inc., an affiliated company of Grau Contracting, provided a panelized wall system for the exterior walls, interior load bearing walls, and shear walls, and a floor truss system. The exterior wall panels delivered to the site included the metal framing, exterior sheathing, and Tyvek vapor barrier. "We also incorporated Red Iron into the exterior wall panels to support the precast that is the exterior finish cladding," said Brian Shropshire, project manager for Gateway Panel.

"This project was unique for us and presented some unusual challenges," Shropshire said. From marrying the panel system to the concrete garage, to soundproofing, to developing ways to move panels without a crane, the Nine North project, "pushed us to create new ideas and test our products in areas we had not considered before, and our company is better for it," he said. One of the challenges was soundproofing the light gauge floor truss system that was topped with a post-tensioned concrete slab.

Two rating systems relate to soundproofing. The Sound Transmission Class (STC) rating measures the reduction of air-borne noise from one side of a partition to the other. Or, in others words, the amount of the noise from one room that you can hear in the neighboring room. The Impact Isolation Class
(IIC) rating measures the reduction of impact noise from one side of a partition to another. In everyday terms, it might measure, for example, how loud footsteps sound when someone walks on the floor above you in hard soled shoes.

Achieving the STC and IIC ratings that
Opus wanted at Nine North was a challenge, said Shropshire. "That took many hours of brainstorming and testing different products until we found a breakthrough. Our light gauge floor truss system now offers extremely high STC and IIC ratings," he said. Gateway Panel's floor truss system also received a two-hour fire rating from United Laboratories (UL) during the project.

The proximity of Park East Tower meant that the crane could not reach every part of the job site. So, "we invented a panel cart for moving panels across the concrete slab to their set location," said Shropshire.

Kaiser Electric Co. was the design/build electrical contractor for the garage and the residential condos and installed the distribution panel for the retail spaces. Kaiser Electric also installed the fire alarm, life safety, and telecommunications systems.

"It was comparable to a loft job," said Michael Murphy, Kaiser Electric's project manager.

"We had three different turnover times on the building," Murphy said. "The public garage was completed and opened first, substantially sooner than the rest of the building, so everything that goes through the garage to service the retail and residential units had to be completed before the garage was done," he said.

"In order to save time and money, we buried the feeder cables - they were PVC coated, metal clad cables - for the residential units in the thickened slab on top of the parking garage. That way, we could get the electrical service over to the residential units without hanging large pipe racks from the garage ceiling," he said.

They used high output T8 florescent lamps in the garage instead of the more traditional metal halide lamps. "Sustainability was a top concern for Opus and the City of St. Louis, and for us that meant creating the desired light levels in the most economical way possible,"
Murphy said.

As there was nowhere on the job site to store materials, Opus had to carefully coordinate the crane service with everyone's material deliveries. "We tried to minimize deliveries to twice weekly so as to not take up a lot of crane time," Murphy said. "The crane really was needed to lift the components of the building, such as the wall panels," he said.

Waterhout Construction was responsible for all the field carpentry. "We did all the woodblocking and backing; all the interior trim, cabinets, doors and hardware; and we did the deck around the pool," said Loren Bueneman, field manager for Waterhout.

The pool deck utilized GeoDeck, a composite lumber made from rice hulls and reclaimed paper by-products. "This was only the third project where we installed
GeoDeck," Bueneman said. Like all composites, it expands and contracts in the heat. At 3,000 square feet, the deck at Nine North was a very large deck and expansion could be a problem. "To counter it, we allowed for moreventilation underneath the deck to even out the temperature between the top and the bottom," Bueneman said.

Bueneman said the biggest challenge was the schedule Waterhout faced. "The job fell behind in the early days because of concrete issues coming out of the ground and we had to help to make it up. And then each unit is like a separate house. Different owners have different cabinet options and different contracts for moving in. That makes it challenging, but our site foreman, Todd Borrini, did a heck-of-a job managing those issues," he said.

"We really enjoyed working with Opus. They did a first-rate job coordinating the crane to get our materials up in an efficient manner. And administratively, they use a computer system, Hypen BuildPro,that helped generate an efficient schedule and effectively handled billing," he said.

"A mixed-use project is always more complex," Downs said. "These three subcontractors were most crucial to the project's success. Each of them performed at an extremely high level in both management and field operations on critical path work under extreme schedule constraints," he said.

"It was great working with Opus," said Kaiser Electric's Murphy. "They allowed us to do things correctly. They were trying to build a quality product and it showed in how they handled themselves," he said.

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