Marquette Tower to be vacant by end of September as last tenants leave

By the end of September, The Marquette Tower in downtown Cape Girardeau will sit empty once again. At one point, the restored hotel was filled to nearly 80 percent capacity, but since then its occupancy has been in a steady decline.

Ryan Burns, a public information officer for the Missouri Office of Administration, said the state agencies occupying space in the building all will be vacating it by Sept. 30.

The Marquette Tower lobby directory states that five offices are still in the building: the Department of Health and Senior Services, the Department of Revenue's Criminal Investigation Bureau, the Department of Mental Health's Sikeston Regional Center, the Department of Economic Development's training room and the Department of Social Services's Family Support and Children's Division. This leaves the second, fifth, sixth and seventh floors vacant in the 59,750-square-foot building.

However, Burns confirmed the Department of Revenue and Department of Economic Development training offices have not occupied space in the building for several years.

For the department of social services, Burns said "all customer service activities performed by staff at the Marquette location will remain at the current address through Sept. 30, and will then move to 3102 Blattner Drive on Oct. 1."

The front of the Marquette Tower is seen Wednesday. (GLENN LANDBERG)

The departments of mental health, labor, industrial relations and health and senior services are all moving to the former Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield building at 471 Siemers Drive in Cape Girardeau.

The Marquette Tower on Broadway and the 25,000-square-foot Marquette Centre on Fountain Street are not physically connected, but their history has always been intertwined. The tower is listed for a little less than $3.5 million, and the centre is listed for $549,900.

Until the state's recent announcement of its departure, G&S Holdings LLC, the ownership entity of both properties, was trying to lease the tower to different tenants, but now that it's for sale, a variety of different buyers may be interested.

"Sometimes you see a mixed-use, retail or whatever on the ground floors and then maybe have offices above and residents above that, so it's just like a blank canvas from that standpoint," said Tom Kelsey, the real estate broker for the Centre and Tower buildings. "We've had some inquiries from different developers looking for historical things and they would ask about this building back before we knew about the state [leaving], but of course they needed the whole building to do what they wanted to do. This brings forth some different opportunities for that."

The Marquette Tower was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2002, received the first Old Town Cape Girardeau Preservation Award in 2005 and the Missouri Preservation Preserve Missouri Award in 2006.

The Marquette Centre in Cape Girardeau sits vacant Wednesday. (GLENN LANDBERG)

The Marquette Tower began its life as an upscale hotel in the heart of Cape Girardeau, from 1928 to 1971. The building sat vacant until 2002, when Prost Builders Inc. bought the centre and tower properties for $350,000, saving them from destruction. Former real estate agent for the property Thomas M. Meyer of Thomas Meyer Commercial Real Estate Co. said Prost put approximately $7 million into restoring both the buildings, with about 75 cents of each dollar coming from historical tax credits.

However, Meyer specified that the tax credits were used only on historical aspects of the remodeling. Six months after they were put up for sale, the properties were foreclosed and bought out by Great Southern Bank. The transaction included the buildings and the parking lot April 2, 2008, for $3.6 million.

On March 20, 2009, Springfield, Missouri-based G&S Holdings bought the buildings for between $3 million and $4 million, an earlier Missourian article reported.

Since then, a variety of tenants have moved into the Tower and then out again, while the Centre has remained empty since the remodel. In 2008, The Workforce Investment Board moved out of the Marquette Tower and into its current location on South Kingshighway in Cape Girardeau, and MERS/Goodwill followed to the same location in 2010.

Other businesses include Isle Casino Cape Girardeau, which used a floor of the Tower for training before the casino opened on Main Street in October 2012, and The Missouri Career Center: Workforce Development Division also was a previous tenant.

DeAnn Briggs, the vice president of MERS/Goodwill, said a variety of factors went into the organization's decision to move, including lack of signage and accessibility and having related agencies and services on different floors.

Since changing the Tower's listing from leasing to purchasing a month and a half ago, Kelsey said he's had six inquiries about the space, locally and from outside areas.

"This is a unique property," Kelsey said. "It's not like you got a house for sale and you have all those people in the marketplace. We're looking for a needle in the haystack as far as a buyer for something like this."

For more information, visit lorimont.com.

smaue@semissourian.con

388-3644

Pertinent addresses:

338 Broadway, Cape Girardeau, Mo.

221 N. Fountain St., Cape Girardeau, Mo.

3102 Blattner Drive, Cape Girardeau, Mo.

471 Siemers Drive, Cape Girardeau, Mo.