File photo by Eric Ayres Crews from Carl Walker Construction use cranes to place prefabricated concrete facade pieces on the exterior of the new Market Street Parking Garage in late June in downtown Wheeling. The new facility is expected to be completed before the end of this summer.

WHEELING – The new Market Street Parking Garage in downtown Wheeling suddenly looks a lot like the conceptual renderings created before ground was even broken at the site, as over the past couple of weeks, crews have installed the exterior facade of the structure.

According to Wheeling City Manager Robert Herron, the project should be completed before the official end of summer.

Originally, the new six-deck parking garage at the corner of Market and 11th streets was scheduled to be finished in April.

“Part of the slow down of that project was the placement of the concrete facade on the building,” Herron reported this week. “There are 52 pieces of prefabricated concrete panels – that took a little bit longer than anticipated. That work has been completed.”

The city manager said now that the facade panels are in place, other work that had been on hold because of the facade placement can now proceed, and progress is expected to speed up.

“So the estimated project completion date on the Market Street Parking Structure project is Aug. 23 to Sept. 5,” Herron said.

Ground was broken on the new parking structure in April 2022, and it was originally slated for completion last year. Massive amounts of concrete were poured during the construction of the new structure, which for the most part has taken place simultaneously with work on the ongoing Downtown Streetscape Project being completed by the West Virginia Division of Highways.

Pittsburgh-based company Carl Walker Construction was awarded a $12.6 million contract to build the parking garage.

Originally, the city presented the construction of the parking structure as a needed catalyst that would help move plans forward for the private redevelopment of the former Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel building on Market Street – originally known as the Schmulbach Building, built in 1905 as headquarters for a local brewing company of the same name.

At the beginning of January 2021, city leaders joined developer Steve Coon of Coon Restoration and Sealants and Wheeling-Pitt building owner Dr. John Johnson of Access Infrastructure LLC on the top floor of the 12-story former steel company headquarters to announce a partnership to bring an estimated $30 private investment into the downtown landmark, transforming it into the Historic Wheeling-Pitt Lofts. The proposed 128-unit apartment complex was expected to require a significant amount of parking for its tenants, so city officials at that time agreed to pay for and build the nearby parking garage.

The city approved a bond ordinance for up to $19.5 million in order to fund the construction of the new garage.

While taxpayer-funded work on the multimillion-dollar parking structure has proceeded, work on the Wheeling-Pitt Lofts has not. In April of last year, Wheeling City Councilman Ben Seidler publicly expressed concerns about the lack of visible progress being made on the Wheeling-Pitt Lofts project. He, Herron and then Mayor Glenn Elliott and Vice Mayor Chad Thalman visited Coon at his Louisville, Ohio, offices near Canton to get an update on the project.

City leaders subsequently assured the public that the developer was fully committed to the Wheeling-Pitt Lofts project, despite snags related to increasing construction material costs and high interest rates. According to city leaders in April of last year, they expected an announcement about a groundbreaking ceremony for the Wheeling-Pitt Lofts to be announced in the near future. That never happened.

Last week, the chain link fence that surrounded the Wheeling-Pitt building for years – providing at least the appearance that there was a construction site at the location – was quietly removed.

Officials from Coon Restoration and Sealants could not be reached for comment on Wednesday.

As construction of the parking garage nears completion, city leaders have stressed that the new structure was always intended to be a key component to economic development in this area of the downtown, which it is expected to be – regardless of the status of the Wheeling-Pitt Lofts project.

“I will say this – we’ve already had requests for monthly parking in that parking structure, and hopefully when it opens, we will probably have half of it full, which was the target when we first started the project,” Herron said. “That does leave room for additional housing development that may occur in the downtown.”

Herron explained that there will be spaces available for tenants of the Wheeling-Pitt Lofts if that project materializes. There will be a total of around 300 spaces available once the garage is completed.

The city is expected to collect money from motorists who use the fully automated garage and from tenants of the street-level retail units. The city hired Century Realty as its marketing agent to find potential tenants for the 9,000 square feet of retail space on the lower level. That marketing effort is still in progress, according to the city manager.

“There’s been some interest, but the thought process is that once we get that construction completed and all of the stuff out of the way, we’ll be able to better showcase that space,” Herron said.