Construction giving iconic building another life

Thirty-five years have passed since the last Roi-Tan cigars rolled off the assembly line at American Tobacco Co.’s East Bay factory.

Today, The Simpson Organization, based in Atlanta, is turning the old plant, once among Charleston’s biggest employers, into a plush condominium complex.

Construction began in August, and the grand opening is slated for fall 2009, the company said. About a third of the units, priced between $350,000 and $1.6 million, have been sold.

That price tag is hard for Lillie Marsh Doster to fathom. She started working there in 1943, three days shy of her 21st birthday.

For just 10 cents an hour, she assembled wooden cigar boxes on a segregated floor.

Two years later, she joined hundreds of other workers on a picket line. The largely female staff demanded a 65-cent minimum wage, an end to discrimination against black workers and a union shop.

After a six-month strike, workers received about a third of their pay demand. But years later they would be heralded for their early role in the civil rights and women’s movements.

“I didn’t miss but one day. We were on the picket line from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m.” recalled Doster, now 85 years old and still living in Charleston.

Millions of cigars

Even for someone who never worked there, it is hard to imagine the vast transformation happening in a building where hundreds of workers once rolled, wrapped and boxed Roi-Tans. At the height of production, 1.5 million cigars rolled off the assembly line each day.

The plant closed for good in 1973, its budget squeezed by a growing awareness of the harmful effects of smoking. Since then, the 250,000-square-foot building has housed a variety of tenants.

Johnson & Wales University moved in about a decade after American Tobacco closed shop.

The school helped fuel Charleston’s food and beverage industry for the next quarter-century until it packed up and headed to Charlotte, N.C., in 2006. But the building here has never experienced a makeover quite like this.

The 66-unit condo development will be a residential haven complete with a third-floor swimming pool, private wine cellar, rooftop deck, walled garden and movie screening room.

A personal concierge will be among its privileged services. It also will feature 25,000 square feet of office space and 40,000 square feet of retail, including a restaurant, boutiques and, yes, even a cigar store.

A reinvention

The renovation project seems a perfect metaphor for Charleston, a town with a knack for hanging on to its historic exterior image even as its demographics shift.

From the street, to a passer-by, the old Cigar Factory won’t look all that different. Its shell was forever protected when it made the National Register of Historic Places in 1980, four years before countless students entered its doors to earn their cooking stripes.

It is one of the few surviving large-sale industrial buildings from the Victorian era in Charleston.

“The building has been in use since it opened, so it is in amazing shape,” said Scott McKenna, The Simpson Organization’s senior development project manager. “It doesn’t look like it now, but this was a very high-tech building for its day.”

It even predates American Tobacco, which opened its factory in 1903. The building was constructed in 1882 and was operated as a textile mill until the 1886 earthquake shut it down.

The Simpson Organization — its real estate niche is transforming urban properties of historic significance — purchased the building in 2007, more than 125 years after it was built.

The only changes to the facade will be minor: the removal of stucco additions built after 1982 that house stairwells, an elevator and a large chiller, he said.

Inside will be hardly recognizable.

The loft-style units will range in size from 800 to 2,800 square feet. The rooms will feature 15-foot ceilings, hardwood floors, original brick walls, open floor plans and huge industrial windows.

McKenna liked the project so much, he bought one of the units himself.

‘Event of discovery’

As crews peel up the floors and gut the interior, bits of the Cigar Factory’s former life keep surfacing, as though this old building has a story to tell.

Among McKenna’s favorite finds are a few old cigars and several pieces of plastic cow meat — the latter presumably a teaching tool for a culinary class.

“It is a constant event of discovery as we go into this demolition,” McKenna said.

Much of the building’s innards, such as doors, ceilings, desks, trim work and so on are being donated to The Sustainable Warehouse, which will deliver the goods to various nonprofits and neighborhood organizations.

Once the process is complete, workers will have gutted and recycled more than 20 tons of material.

On a recent tour of the preconstruction site, McKenna walked into a second-floor room and looked toward the ceiling. “Take a look at this,” he said. “We didn’t even know these arches were here.”

The room had most recently been used by Johnson & Wales to store boxes of files. The area soon will feature a lobby and restrooms, with showers for active tenants who run or bike the Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge, located outside their door.

Neighborhood in transition

In many ways, it is that bridge that made this project possible. Developers and city leaders anticipated that its opening in 2005 would reignite interest in the Eastside neighborhood.

McKenna called the area a “neighborhood in transition.” The view from the building’s roof includes the bridge, church steeples and trees. But it also includes Charleston’s more industrial side, the Port of Charleston’s Columbus Street Terminal. The area also is home to several modest neighborhoods, many with deep roots.

Along with the Cigar Factory, a new rash of developments are on the drawing board for the upper peninsula area.

Elouise Eady, a machine operator at the cigar factory from 1952-1972 and a resident of the nearby Silver Hill neighborhood, said it is hard to envision the shifting landscape.

“I just can’t imagine,” said Eady, who is president of the Silver Hill-Magnolia Neighborhood Council. “They call it progress, but maybe they could have taken that place and made jobs out of it. It was a job place.”

Arthur Maybank, another longtime resident and secretary of the Eastside Community Development Corp., applauded The Simpson Organization’s commitment to encourage contractors to employ neighborhood workers. He hopes others follow suit.

“The neighborhood fabric is changing anyway,” Maybank said. “You’re either a part of change or change happens to you. We can’t buy a unit, so we’re glad we have a stake in building the future of it.”