ANN ARBOR, MI - As his company's longtime headquarters was reduced to rubble this week, Fred Beal watched and smiled.
"That pile right there, that's my office," he said, pointing toward a heap of wood and concrete on the ground.
Minutes later, his old second-floor conference room was next to come crumbling down.
The president of JC Beal Construction Inc. said he's not feeling sentimental about saying goodbye to 221 Felch St., which has been his company's home in Ann Arbor for decades.
"It's kind of fun to move on to the next step," said the 62-year-old builder, who has relocated his office to downtown Ypsilanti and is now working with the Promanas Group to build 51 luxury condos on the Felch Street property just outside downtown Ann Arbor.
Beal said the rules around use of the Felch Street industrial site made it impractical to do much to improve it, so it's been kind of a dump, and he's happy to finally clean it up and put it to new use.
The site has been home to many companies over the past century, including Ann Arbor Building Supply Inc., R.T. Mitchell Construction. Co., Tramontin Tile Co., and for decades now, Beal.
Many years ago, an old railroad spur -- parts of which are still visible -- were used to unload lumber directly into the yard.
"It's always been kind of a builder location," said Beal, who noted Dale Krull Construction Co. was there for a number of years, too, before moving out to Wagner Road.
JC Beal Construction grew out of another company called E.E. Kurtz Construction Co., which was founded in 1962 by Eugene Kurtz and operated out of a house at 407 N. Main St. in Ann Arbor.
Fred Beal's father, Jim Beal, was one of Kurtz's original employees and took over the company in 1978 when Kurtz retired.
"They built stuff all over Ann Arbor," Fred Beal said of E.E. Kurtz Construction. "They built Willow Run High School, they built the Ypsilanti Township center that stands today, various things."
The company moved a couple blocks over to 221 Felch in the late 1970s.
"They kind of downsized with Gene leaving to where my dad was running a little bit more of a small remodeling service kind of a business until I got involved, and then we started to grow it again," Fred Beal said of the rise of JC Beal Construction.
"Then I brought my brother in and we started to grow it some more to where we got it up to a much larger business eventually."
Fred Beal began working for his father's company in 1980, starting as a carpenter before becoming a project manager, then vice president and eventually president by the mid '80s. George Beal, current vice president, joined the company in 1987.
JC Beal Construction bought the Felch Street property in the early 1990s, after having been there since the late 1970s.
In addition to the Beal headquarters, several other businesses have been tenants in the collection of buildings and sheds at 221 Felch over the years, including skilled trades workers.
Fred Beal said there were as many as 28 tenants on the property at one time, the last ones moving out only recently.
"It was really strong in home improvement and maintenance-type activities for all that time we owned it until 2007, and then those guys all went out of business or really shrunk," he said. "You know, they went back to their house, worked out of their garage or whatever, so we had a lot of vacant spaces for a while."
Then other companies came.
"These sheds tended to be used by somebody who wanted to do something unique, like they wanted a big art space to work in, so it would be rented sometimes for a year, sometimes for five, by something like that," Fred Beal said.
It was home to companies such as Duco Home Services, Green Street Tree Care, The Gutter Doctor, The Roof Doctor, Urban Energy Works, Great Lakes Imagery, and Alan Haber's carpentry shop. Trolley Pub also housed its pedal-powered pubs there.
Nora Lee Wright, an attorney and Fred Beal's wife, kept an office there, as did Beal Properties, a company run by Stewart Beal, Fred's son. The Beal companies recently relocated to storefront spaces at 17-23 N. Washington St. in Ypsilanti.
"We are quadrupling down on Ypsilanti (live, work, public schools, invest) and are really excited to continue to contribute to the revitalization of downtown and Washington Street," Beal Properties wrote on its Facebook page last month.
"We expect our 40 team members to make a major impact relating to foot traffic and supporting neighboring businesses as we have as many as 2,000 visits to our office a month. We hope our move encourages additional companies to do the same."
Stewart Beal, who lives in Ypsilanti, started working for JC Beal Construction at the age of 14. He worked for the shop manager and spent hundreds of hours during high school organizing the tools and equipment used by the JC Beal staff.
"This was back when JC Beal employed over 100 carpenters and laborers, so they were constantly bringing tools in and out," he said, noting one of his jobs was writing and spray-painting "Beal" on hundreds of tools, shovels, brooms and other items.
"I also worked as a delivery person constantly going to Fingerle and Stadium Hardware and running materials from those stores to jobs all over the University of Michigan campus," he said, adding the shop manager also taught him how to repair tools.
In 2002, he started Beal Properties, which operated out of 221 Felch for 15 years.
Stewart Beal said it was a great place with lots of great tenants, and he has great memories there, but he's not sad to see it go.
He said he's really pleased with the decision to relocate the company to downtown Ypsilanti, as it means much less driving back and forth between Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti, and he's now part of a thriving downtown and closer to many of his properties and tenants.
Fred Beal said he's happy with the move, too, and he's keeping busy as a builder with no plans to retire yet.
Earlier this week, he reminisced about some of the big projects JC Beal Construction did over the years while operating out of 221 Felch, including a 34-story rehab of Broderick Tower in downtown Detroit, significant work on the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel, a 330-room hotel in Atlanta, Georgia, and renovation work on the UM campus, as well as Google's first offices in Ann Arbor.
"We had quite a stint of working on Main Street and in the restaurant area when the buildings were kind of being renovated for the first time after a lot of disuse," he added, noting that included Grizzly Peak, Cafe Zola and apartments above it, Mongolian Grill, and apartments that are now condos above Starbucks at Main and Liberty.
He also completed a condo addition above the Vinology bar and restaurant on Main Street and lived there for a while.
He and his wife currently live in Burns Park, but they're planning to move into one of the new condos JC Beal Construction is building at the 221 Felch property once they're finished.
They're taking a unit on the west side on the top floor, facing toward the railroad tracks and the Water Hill neighborhood.
"There are some end units that are pretty spectacular. We're not in one of those," Fred Beal said.
Fred Beal shepherded the Kingsley Condominiums project through the approval process before handing it off to the Promanas Group, a private equity real estate investment firm that's now carrying out the development and marketing it at KingsleyCondos.com.
Promanas will be the owner and seller of the condos, while JC Beal Construction is the contractor. It's a five-story, single-building project.
"I'm just happy to have been able to put this together," Fred Beal said. "You know, we started out with a plan to do this because in the longterm we knew something needed to happen here.
"It's going to be a fun project to do."
John Bogdasarian, president of the Promanas Group, said 20 of the units already are reserved, which leaves 31 more to sell.
Bogdasarian, who said he's lived in Ann Arbor his whole life, said it feels good to be doing a project that people seem to like. He said it's making better use of the property and there doesn't seem to be any lack of demand for this type of housing product.
"The neighbors have all seemed pretty happy with this throughout the whole process, which is really cool to see in Ann Arbor," he added. "Nobody wants to be the bad-guy developer."
The listed pre-construction prices range from $420,000 for a 950-square-foot unit on the second floor to more than $1 million for units on the upper floors measuring more than 2,000 square feet.
There also are two custom units on the upper floors that are close to 3,000 and 3,500 square feet. Prices for those are not disclosed.
A brownfield plan was approved for the project to facilitate cleanup of environmental contamination on the site.
It calls for using tax-increment financing to reimburse the developer for up to $4 million worth of work using a portion of the new tax revenues that will be generated by the development. Bogdasarian said that will help keep the condos relatively affordably priced.
Following completion of the demolition and cleanup work, Bogdasarian said, the condo building should start taking shape later this fall. He expects it to be ready for occupancy within 18-24 months.
Neighbors are still wondering whether the adjacent Burt Forest Products Co. property will be redeveloped eventually.
Fred Beal said he talked with the owner when he was putting together the Kingsley Condominiums project.
"While he might consider vacating that site, he would not do it for a price less than would really move his business, and that makes it fairly prohibitive to put any kind of a deal together until he's ready," he said. "He's not going to disrupt his business and move unless it's really worth it."
Fred Beal said it would have been logical to add another 10 condos onto the Kingsley Condominiums project if the adjacent site was acquired. To do a standalone condo project there in the future would be a little tougher, he said, but it could work.
There's a 30-foot-wide area between the yet-to-be-built Kingsley Condominiums building and the western property line where the developer has agreed to leave room for a future trail running the length of the site from Felch to Kingsley.
In the coming years, that's expected to become part of what's been envisioned for many years as the Allen Creek greenway trail, or what's been more recently called the Allen Creek urban trail.
The Allen Creek once ran through the site and was buried in a concrete box culvert in 1926.
The strip of land dedicated for a future trail there is one of two public-access easements through the property.
The public also will be able to use the new sidewalks through the property to get between Kingsley and Felch streets.
The condos will have Kingsley Street addresses, though there will be access to the site via both Kingsley and Felch.