OPINION

West Lafayette and Purdue's State Street project is spurring a newer, taller downtown. Will there be room for campus landmarks to fit in? Owners, city say, yes

Dave Bangert | dbangert@jconline.com

John von Erdmannsdorff figures the question isn’t whether he’s had offers in the past year to sell the State Street buildings that house his Von’s Shops and neighboring Harry’s Chocolate Shop, a couple of campus institutions a block away from Purdue University.

It’s more a matter of how often a developer has come knocking.

The answer, von Erdmannsdorff said: “Repeatedly.”

The offers, he said, typically include some version of new construction – retail on the first floor, five or more stories of apartments up high, much in the style of a high-density, close-to-campus trend in full swing just east of Purdue’s red brick boundaries.

Not that von Erdmannsdorff is looking to sell the buildings that since 1971 have housed the bookstore he and his wife, Sylvia, first started in an apartment around the corner when they were Purdue graduate students. He said he feels an obligation to keep up the liberal arts niche destination he has nurtured near the engineering-bound university.

For now, anyway.

But the pressure is there. He’s sitting on prime real estate. He said he gets that.

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Last week, just beyond the reach of his property’s 38 back-lot parking spaces, contractors dropped off front-end loaders and stripped gas meters from houses, prepping to clear a block for The Hub, a nearly $50 million project that will be the first 10-story building off campus in West Lafayette.

Another set of developers a few blocks over wants to build an even taller building – an 18-story retail-and-residential high rise – at State Street and Chauncey Avenue, now the site of University Lutheran Church. County and city planners say more tall projects are in the works, an intentional consequence of the city and university’s $120 million revamp of State Street.

And that’s the challenge. How does West Lafayette build the downtown it never had – as Mayor John Dennis likes to put it – and still not lose the campus flavor a handful of long-time, independently owned businesses bring?

“It’s tricky – really tricky,” said Erik Carlson, West Lafayette development director. “When I try to sell this community – and I do – I try to sell them on what makes West Lafayette different, what’s unique. I show them your Von’s. Your Harry’s. Your Triple XXX. ... Every other campus community can do that, too – unless they’ve screwed up. We have no intention of anything but getting this right. …

“When I talk to developers, what I’m hearing is they want those places to be there. That’s what makes the city what it is.”

Still, the offers come to buy von Erdmannsdorff’s property.

“If it was just economics, we’d have been gone long ago,” von Erdmannsdorff said. “This is what I do. … Not a day goes by that people don’t say they appreciate that you’re here. ‘We don’t know what we’d do without you.’ So I’m holding on. … I don’t think you’ll hear that story from just me.”

‘They’re legendary’

How big a deal are places like Triple XXX, a counter-top drive-in, and Harry’s, a bar that has been in the same spot at State and Pierce streets since 1919, in the Purdue landscape? Here’s some context from Brian Cardinal, a former Purdue basketball player who went on to a long career in the NBA before returning to West Lafayette as assistant director of the John Purdue Club.

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“I’ve got an awesome position where I’m allowed to go out and speak to alums about rekindling the fire and motivating them to come back to Purdue, if they haven’t been back for a while,” Cardinal said. “When they come back, it’s on their itinerary: Purdue basketball game, then we’re going to go to the Chocolate Shop, hit the Triple XXX. It’s always up there. They’re legendary.”

Triple XXX opened midway up State Street Hill, “On the Hill But on the Level” at 2 N. Salisbury St., in 1929. Inside the orange-and-black striped exterior topped with a neon advertisement for the Triple XXX root beer, it’s a sit-where-you-can place with menu items named for famed Purdue athletes – quarterback Drew Brees, Olympic diving gold medalist David Boudia and running back Leroy Keyes among them.

(Side note: Cardinal has been lobbying to get his name on that menu. “I’ve got buddies who are always busting my chops,” he said. “‘You mean you can’t get a dish at the Triple XXX named after you? What do you gotta do?’ I’m working on it. It would be so cool.” One suggestion floated, hailing from his nickname during his Purdue days: Citizen Paine-cakes.)

Greg and Carrie Ehresman have run the Triple XXX since 1999, after buying it from Greg Ehresman’s father, Jack, who had it from 1980.

Greg Ehresman said the Triple XXX isn’t going anywhere. But he said he’s watching how State Street develops, while reminiscing about independent business that have come, gone or moved.

“If we’re not careful, we’re going to end up looking like every single town we go see in the Big Ten,” Ehresman said. “All tall, one color, all the same design, with the same size and looks to the signs. It’s monotonous as hell, in my opinion. That’s not memorable or worth traveling to visit. … I hope we all keep that in mind through it all.”

Ehresman said no one has come to ask about buying his property. He said he doesn’t think he’d listen if they did. He said he and Carrie invested in improvements to the Triple XXX property in the past year, with plans for more in the coming years. The Triple XXX advertises on Interstate 65 as a destination dining spot in West Lafayette, playing up a visit from Food Network’s Guy Fieri for a 2007 segment on “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives.”

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“This is no short-term thing for us,” Ehresman said. “People say, ‘Yeah, what if they dropped a pile of money on you? You’d walk away.’ I’m not so sure. It’s not the way it is. It’s not why we’re in it. … I have plans to be there for the 100th anniversary, which is 2029. We definitely want to be part of what’s going forward with State Street.”

Building up, as in taller

The State Street project is cramming $120 million of work between the Wabash River and U.S. 231 into a three-year window, scheduled to wrap up at the end of 2018, in time for Purdue’s 150th anniversary. The goals include slowing vehicles through campus and routing commuters to a series of ring roads. That, planners hope, will make for a more pedestrian-friendly campus and West Lafayette Village. That’s brought developers out of the woodwork. And the city has signaled that it’s open to high-density projects close to campus.

Nick DeBoer is a West Lafayette City Council member whose district includes the Village and the south campus neighborhoods. He’s been a proponent of building up – as in taller projects – to get more housing close to campus.

“The problem I am trying to solve is rent inflation that is taking money from the pockets of students and dumping it into a black hole instead of into durable goods, spending it at our restaurants and bars,” DeBoer said. “I think that can be done with those historic buildings surviving.”

He said he thought there’s enough “low-hanging fruit” ready for development, including aging portions of town south of State Street, the eventual redevelopment of Chauncey Hill Mall and the stagnant, boarded-up buildings at the corner of State and Northwestern Avenue. (A five-story development was approved there in 2012, but owners ran into financial disputes. So today’s Purdue seniors know it only for its boarded windows and fliers telling patrons to cross the street to a new Where Else? Bar location opened nearly five years ago.)

“I don’t think anyone is agitating to demolish Harry’s,” DeBoer said. “But I am also not a real estate investor. This is a market decision. … We are fortunate that campus flavor is really dependent on the campus you went to school at. If those buildings were redeveloped, almost no one would be the wiser four (to) eight years out.

“But again,” DeBoer said referring to available spots to develop near campus, “there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit.”

What DeBoer talks about can be true on a campus where the institutional memory is diced into four-year chunks.

Take the case of Bruno’s, uprooted by road construction rather than development in 1998. In the move to the corner of Brown and Howard streets in the Levee area, the restaurant made sure there was a window to the kitchen so you can keep seeing them making pizza as you walk in. But memories fade of seeing a member of the Itin family tossing pizza dough in the window of Bruno’s former location while driving through the State Street and River Road traffic lights – roughly where Silver Dipper ice cream shop is now in the River Market center.

“You lose something when you lose those touches,” Ehresman said. The old Bruno’s was roughly where Silver Dipper ice cream shop is now in the River Market Shoppes center.

“I’d put Bruno’s in there as one of those landmarks,” Ehresman said. “They made a move work because they’re so good at what they do. People still look for Bruno’s because of that tradition. … Places like ours and Bruno’s, people know and people want, with that local feel. I think that trend will just continue.”

‘Downtown feel has lost its charm’

Matt Garrison is a principal investor with R2 Companies, which is working on The Rise development where University Lutheran is now. Initial plans filed with the Tippecanoe County Area Plan Commission called for 687 bedrooms and more than 20,000 square feet of retail space in an 18-story building. Final plans are expected as soon as mid-February.

“Historic buildings and businesses like Harry’s and Von’s are assets that should be protected,” Garrison said. “They are part of the fabric of the State Street landscape that gives it a soul. Of course, they are at the epicenter of campus; they could be targeted by developers. … The goal is to embrace what makes a place unique, while also encouraging economic development and innovation.”

Garrison pointed to other places, including the redevelopment of warehouse spaces in the Fulton River District on Chicago’s Near West Side.

“It’s always better to save historic buildings in their original form,” Garrison said. “The magic happens when preservation meets market forces as it has in Fulton Market, where historic buildings are more sought out than new ones for their character.”

Shawna McCulley, owner of Eclectic Hair Salon at 115 N. Chauncey Ave., is a board member of the Wabash Valley Trust for Historic Preservation.

“I have worked in the Chauncey Village neighborhood for 25 years and have seen the progress change the skyline,” McCulley said. “The loss of some great historic structures are forgotten, only to be replaced by multi-story apartment complexes. The Chauncey Village neighborhood is the original downtown West Lafayette, but yet its downtown feel has lost its charm.”

She said the city’s Historic Preservation Commission should get ahead of any more State Street-related development and create a historic district for the Village. (The city currently has one historic district: the New Chauncey neighborhood near the northeastern edge of campus.)

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Chris Kulesza, president of the West Lafayette Historic Preservation Commission, said there hasn’t been talk about a Village district of any sort.

“I think that both the city and the students are committed to ensuring that the most historic properties in Chauncey are protected, whether they are in a historic district or not,” Kulesza said. “There is quite a bit of potential for the State Street project to emphasize the truly historic properties that are there now, and every indication seems to be that it is going that way.”

For now, Carlson said the city’s role is limited if a developer makes an offer a property owner can’t refuse.

“The city isn’t going to buy a place and run it,” Carlson said. “That just can’t happen. What our jobs are is to make sure these places have what they need to survive. And that’s a customer base to help them thrive. That’s one thing these new developments, all within a few steps, will do, we hope.”

‘We plan to be here’

For all the talk about more pedestrians, von Erdmannsdorff isn’t persuaded by city and county planners’ discussions about fewer cars coming to campus and the need for fewer parking spots in the new high rises. He wonders if it means he’ll need to dedicate more staff time to patrol the parking spaces dedicated to Von’s. But dealing with parking, he said, has been a constant from the start.

Part of lasting near campus this long has been an ability to adjust, anyway.

The von Erdmannsdorffs opened the bookstore in 1971, after three years of selling books out of their apartment a few blocks away. (“Every book we wanted to read, you had to special order,” he said. “Eventually, we were doing the same for other people. That turned into, ‘When can we come browse?’”) The von Erdmannsdorffs slowly expanded the business as they saw opportunity. Example: When Hewlett Packard test marketed calculators, he joined the National Association of College Stores over the phone to be in on it. Von’s added and subtracted over the next five decades: video rental, records, computers, clothing, cards, beads, comic books, whatever.

“Always, though, to make the bookstore work,” von Erdmannsdorff said.

By 1979, von Erdmannsdorff bought the buildings from the curve of State Street – now the Dough Shack calzone restaurant – to the one that houses Harry’s at the corner of Pierce Street.

So in a way, he’s curator of two campus landmarks, both of which have their fans.

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Harry’s, owned since 1977 by Herschel and Mary Cook, topped BuzzFeed’s list of Best College Bars in America in 2015 – a point that wasn’t lost on Mike Berghoff, chairman of the Purdue Board of Trustees, last fall as he rattled off how the university’s football program wasn’t living up to Purdue standards. (“Hell,” Berghoff said, “even Harry’s was ranked as the best campus bar in the country.”) Purdue President Mitch Daniels jokes that his contract includes a stipulation that he stop in Harry’s periodically, just for good measure.

“The nostalgia of the Purdue memorabilia and the pure history of the place makes you feel like you’re a part of something bigger,” said Matt Sampson, a 2016 Purdue graduate now working as a banquet manager for a hotel in Monterey, California. “Homecoming has been the only time I’ve been back to campus since graduation. My best friends all reconvened at Harry’s, and it was like we never left.”

As for Von’s? Charlie Ross, an English professor and director of the Comparative Literature Program, found Von’s when he moved to West Lafayette in 1977. He said it’s the place that still stocks the latest critical books in literature and philosophy.

“When you ask (long-time manager Jim Martin) about a book, you don’t feel like you’ve come from outer space,” Ross said. “It’s the bookstore that makes all the difference in the community.”

There’s some pleasure, and some pressure, in that sentiment, von Erdmannsdorff said. The way a business might take a job recruit to a fancy restaurant, he said, it’s not unusual for faculty department heads to bring a professor candidate to Von’s.

“You know, to prove this is a place they can be,” von Erdmannsdorff said.

“People who go to New York City, they say you have to go to Times Square,” von Erdmannsdorff said. “At Purdue, they come to this block. That sounds a little like braggadocio, I guess. But I hear it constantly.”

From a seat in the Dough Shack, he paused and looked over his shoulder, through the plate glass toward the brick exterior that advertises the assorted wares in Von’s Shops.

“Forget Von’s for a second. Can you imagine the building coming down, and the Chocolate Shop going into some shell of a new building?” von Erdmannsdorff said. “All those generations of kids who had their first drink at the Chocolate Shop, when they come back to Purdue years later, it’ll be … I don’t know, different.”

That’s a sense of obligation he said he can’t shake.

At least not now, even as State Street’s stimulus puts a premium on the land and business he’s owned for 46 years, nearly a third of Purdue’s existence.

“It’s going to be claustrophobic, I imagine,” von Erdmannsdorff said, contemplating being surrounded by tall buildings. “But we’re here. We plan to be here.”

Bangert is a columnist with the Journal & Courier. Contact him at dbangert@jconline.com. Follow on Twitter: @davebangert.

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