508 West turns piece of Spokane medical history, defunct parking garage into upscale housing

Nick Brumback hopes motorists happening to glance south on Interstate 90 through downtown will see one cohesive skyscraper in his new apartment building, the 508 West.

The longtime medical complex is actually hiding two structures within. There’s the offices where Spokanites for decades attended medical and dental appointments, or filled prescriptions in the continuously running, locally owned pharmacy on the ground floor. But the west side of the building was actually a parking structure, served by a vaunted automatic elevator system that frequently malfunctioned and was mothballed shortly after it was introduced in the mid-1960s.

“Our goal, at the end of the day, you drive by the freeway and look up and say, ‘Well, that’s a beautiful building,’ ” said Brumback, president of Brumback Real Estate and Construction. “What we didn’t want people to do was drive by and go, ‘Oh God, what was that? What did they do?’ ”

The renovation, begun before the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic and costing what Brumback estimates as more than $20 million, brought a skyscraping crane to the lower South Hill and a complete rebuild, floor-by-floor, of that defunct parking structure. The team is now in its final stretch of construction, topping off the building with 10th-story penthouses and a lounge for all tenants providing views over downtown, the Spokane River and Mount Spokane to the south.

“We’ve got a tough 60 days to get it done, and then we’ll discuss celebrating it,” said Brumback on a recent Tuesday afternoon from the under-construction 10th story lounge. His firm’s portfolio includes the Cedar Crossing Townhomes and Apartments just north of Francis Avenue in the Five Mile area, a complex in the Perry District and mini storage units around town.

The building was completed in phases, with apartments in the former medical office side of the building overlooking Stevens Street to the east being finished first. Nine floors of apartments, previously home to weight loss centers, fertility clinics, physician’s and dentist’s firms, are available for lease on the east side of the building. The lobby still provides access to Sixth Avenue Medical Pharmacy, as it has since 1964, with room for a coffee shop and other potential amenities, Brumback said.

Erik Nelson purchased the pharmacy in 2013 from the original owner, Jerry Stocker. The construction of the apartment buildings during a pandemic presented several challenges to the small, independent pharmacy, Nelson said. But he believed the business was able to survive because of the specialized services it provides to clients.

“To say that it didn’t hurt our business would be a lie,” Nelson said. But he said Brumback’s ownership had been much better than his previous landlords. Nelson said Brumback allowed the pharmacy to increase the size of the its drive-thru window on the south side of the building.

“I don’t plan on leaving,” Nelson said. “It’s convenient for the hospitals. It’s convenient for the highway.”

He anticipated the pharmacy may need to start carrying new products, such as toilet paper and laundry soap for the in-unit washing machines, to meet the needs of tenants.

Floor plans for the apartments above the pharmacy vary, with options for studio, one- and two-bedroom units, all with new windows that are the same size as what were in the medical building, looking out either over the city to the north or Edwidge Woldson Park to the south. Those on the east side of the building can see the facade of Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center climbing over smaller buildings.

The team hopes to attract students, young professionals and retirees alike. Unit prices range from $1,250 monthly for a studio up to $1,850 for two-bedroom units, and more for the luxury penthouses on the top of the structure.

Brumback began leasing units at the beginning of the summer. In early August, before they had finished the lofts, the building was already close to 25% occupied, with about half of the units on the east side of the building occupied, said Taylor Swoverland, leasing manager for the property. Many tenants are looking for an apartment that provides the best view within their budget, Swoverland said.

“It’s a huge selling point,” he said of the views of downtown and the surrounding area.

The team also hopes to entice renters with modern amenities seen in residential properties in Portland, Seattle and other areas of the Pacific Northwest. The basement of the former medical offices now houses secure storage for bicycles with plans for charging stations for electric models, though there’s also a secure parking lot just across Stevens Street for renters with cars to use. Guests of tenants are also given a first chance to rent a room on the first floor that will also be available for online short-term rentals like AirBnB, Brumback said. They call it the “Guest Room.”

There’s a common dog-grooming station, and Brumback pointed specifically to the mail room and package center down the hall that has additional storage space as tenants begin filling the rooms.

“You’d walk into these beautiful new 15-story buildings, for example in Portland because we went there to tour, and you’d walk into this beautiful lobby and there’s just packages in the hallway,” Brumback said.

The extra space for packages is a testament to how the world has changed since construction first began back in 2019. The pandemic brought a demand for additional parcel and delivery service, and the team pivoted to incorporate that demand into its design, Brumback said.

His firm includes his father and its founder, Donald “Gig” Brumback, perhaps best known locally for building the Plantes Ferry Sports Complex in Spokane Valley in 1998. After several other offers fell through, the firm bought the building, which changed ownership several times after opening in 1964 as what The Spokesman-Review described as “a $1.5 million showpiece of modern office architecture.” The purchase price for the roughly 89,000-square-foot building was $1.2 million in October 2019, according to property records, as part of the liquidation of assets belonging to the estate of late real estate mogul James Cotter.

“There was all sorts of, founded or not, rumors and skeletons in this building, which I think gave some people pause,” Brumback said.

Chief among them, he said, was how to make the 15-story parking structure work with a nine-story medical office building next door. The parking system was lauded as a technological marvel when it opened, built by a firm called Systematic. A Sept. 6, 1964, story in The Spokesman-Review quoted the firm’s president saying the elevator system could lift or lower a car 350 feet per minute.

But the system was plagued by malfunctions and stoppages. In December 1968, a crane was needed to remove cars from upper floors after the system had been out of service for “several days,” according to the newspaper. Two years later, in August 1970, a 19-year-old received a compound fracture when “his leg became pinned between the parking elevator and the second floor when (he) started the elevator,” according to a story in the Aug. 26, 1970, edition of The Spokesman-Review.

News accounts of the parking structure are scarce in the next decade. In 1977, when the building sold once more to a new group, the tower was referred to as “dormant.”

The building would make headlines again in the summer of 1985, as it became a political battleground for the public debate about abortions. Protesters, among them state lawmakers and members of the clergy, accosted visitors seeking treatment at clinics inside the building, some of which provided abortions. Eventually the Washington Supreme Court was asked to weigh in on the constitutionality of the protests after a pair of nurses at Sacred Heart were arrested for trespassing. An injunction from that court prohibited protesters from congregating on the sidewalk in front of the building.

The dormant parking structure provided a unique challenge to the restoration team, as architects and construction teams devised a plan to take out alternating floors and replace the parking areas with lofted apartment units. The process required crews to fill in the old elevator shaft with concrete as they worked up the building to keep it from toppling over, then remove the extra floors, Brumback explained. The process was like allowing workers to build in a “safe box,” which kept the building intact and prevented them from potential falls.

“Every time we filled in a floor, we were stiffening the entire structure,” he said. “And when we got two floors ahead, we brought the excavators in and demo crew, and then they started taking out the mid floors.”

That left 13-foot tall ceilings on that side of the structure. Rather than making high-ceilinged units, Brumback said, the team decided on a loft floorplan that gives the tenant just enough room for a work space, or “man cave,” or study just above the living area. Navigating the height of the lower floor with the loft was an exact science, he said.

“The architects spent many, many meetings, and many, many versions of it, and it came down to not only inches, but a half an inch or a quarter of an inch,” Brumback said.

The floor-to-ceiling windows facing south look out onto Edwidge Woldson Park, and two units on each floor offer outdoor balconies to their tenants.

The medical office units have been available to rent a couple of months. Construction on the loft units was wrapping up as Brumback gave the tour in early August, and hopes to have units in the garage side of the building available for rent by Labor Day, he said.

Completed construction on the medical side, and the demand for young professional housing in Spokane, has Brumback confident the renovated building will attract tenants to a skyscraping part of Spokane’s past.

“I think we’ve spent too many years with not enough supply, and too much demand, and that, in our developer-builder minds, became normal,” he said.

“I think the supply of units is healthy,” he said.