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Knapp’s Centre is Passion Project for Nick Eyde BY MiCkEY HiRTEN
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ick Eyde had hoped to finish the reconstruction of downtown Lansing’s Knapp’s Centre in 16 months. It’s taken longer, but it’s worth every extra day.
Along with office spaces, the center includes 23,000 square feet of residential space in the form of apartments on the upper floors and retail on the ground levels — a new life for an old building. Altogether, the renovation will cost as much as $36 million. The interior of the department store, built in 1937 and closed in 1980, has been hollowed out to create a spectacular floorto-ceiling atrium. It is a different building altogether from the sturdy and functional department store that once anchored
NIck EydE Age: 34 community: Holt Title: Partner with the Eyde Co. Joined at the end of 2006 My father – George Edye Family: Married to Gaia; 17-monthold son George. We call him Gigio Interests: Sports, tennis and running, reading and writing Favorite getaway: We pretty much like to go up North. keep promising to get to Cedar Point. We like roller coasters.
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PHOTO B Y M ARK WAR N E R
The iconic building, vacant and in disrepair for too long, will have its grand opening this summer. By that time Eyde, and the rest of the company that bears his family’s name, will have relocated to the Knapp’s Centre from their current headquarters on Hagadorn Road in East Lansing.
Eyde pictured in front of the Knapp’s Centre in downtown Lansing
downtown Lansing. Open and airy, the office and retail spaces are modern, a touch European, in fact, all wrapped in the iconic art deco ceramic shell. This has been Nick Eyde’s project from the start, full of the twists and turns needed to honor the past but prepare for the future. Because of its historical designation, the Knapp’s Centre exterior needed to be reconstructed to exacting preservation standards. The National Park Service was one of the agencies that determined what could be changed and what couldn’t. “Our challenge was how to get back to the original look of the building,” Eyde said. It affected the colors and textures of the exterior, the windows, the style of prismatic glass blocks — an exhaustive list that preserves the art deco character of a building that is unique to Lansing, perhaps the nation. Eyde said he is aware of only one other building like the Knapp’s Centre, a rehabilitated Hecht Co. department store in Washington.
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The Eyde family business — land development and construction — ultimately prepared him, along with his brothers and sisters, for challenges like the Knapp’s Centre. But for Nick Eyde there was a detour — six years playing American football in Europe, most notably for the Italian Serie A Bolzano Giants. As with the Knapp’s project, Eyde was the quarterback, whose exploits and long passes still live on YouTube. He played three seasons of college ball at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minn; his brothers were football players. It’s a family affair. Eyde’s first large project after joining the Eyde Company was working closely with his father, George to rehabilitate the 30-story former Owens Corning headquarters in Toledo, now christened Tower on the Maumee. The incentive and loan packages arranged for the Toledo project served as a template for the Knapp’s Centre project, which has used brownfield funds, a $5.9 million Section 108 loan from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Renewal, about $19 million in historic