NATCHEZ, Miss. – The mayor and city aldermen unveiled plans Thursday to demolish the Fry Building and put a downtown Natchez parking garage in its place.
The Board of Aldermen voted to accept property owner Walter Davis III’s donation of the building to the city, which will have it torn down and then construct a multilevel parking facility, said Mayor Dan Gibson.
“We have a parking shortage in downtown Natchez, and we need a parking garage,” Gibson said.
Once the city’s largest office building – located on the corner of Pearl and Franklin streets — the 1950s structure has deteriorated and been partly vacant for several years.
Gibson said a parking garage could help prompt the renovation and reopening of the adjacent Eola Hotel, which has been closed since 2014. Developers since then have planned and begun work to refurbish the 1927 landmark, but that’s been stalled the past couple of years.
The Fry Building donation – secret-code named Project Phoenix — has been the subject of discussions closed to the public by the mayor and the six city aldermen in recent meetings. At Thursday’s public session to officially accept the building, no details were discussed about how the city will pay for its demolition and the parking garage’s construction.
The building has an appraised value of about $1 million, said City Attorney Bryan Callaway.
Gibson said the new structure could include space for retailers below the multilevel public parking garage.
Whatever changes made to the Fry building site, he said, must be reviewed by the city’s preservation and planning commissions to ensure its new use is proper and design is architecturally and historically appropriate.
The Fry Building was constructed in 1956 and designed by prominent New Orleans architect Arthur Davis, according to Trulia.com, a subsidiary of the real-estate listing group Zillow. Davis was described as a “modernist architect who was instrumental in redefining New Orleans’ skyline” by The Times-Picayune newspaper when he died in 2011 at age 91. His architectural firm’s list of buildings include the Louisiana Superdome, the University of New Orleans Lakefront Arena and the city’s Royal Sonesta Hotel, according to Davis’ autobiography “It Happened by Design.”
The book noted he evacuated to Natchez and stayed in an unnamed historic house in 2008 when Hurricane Gustav was heading toward New Orleans.
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