A vacant high rise in downtown Macon is getting a new life. Here’s what is planned.
Plans for a hotel and retail space at a downtown high rise that once was the city’s annex building got the green light Monday at a Macon-Bibb County Planning & Zoning Commission hearing.
Government offices moved out of the Willie C. Hill annex building about two years ago. Before that, the county hired a company to perform a study to determine what could be done with the building.
The conclusion reached in 2017 was that the 11-story tower and its conjoined five-story Art Deco building would be best suited for apartments.
However, new plans presented Monday by architect Gene Dunwody call for a 94-room hotel above two floors of retail space at 682 Cherry Street.
Parking for the hotel would be located in the vacant lot behind the pink house and Macon City Auditorium, he said.
“We will have a name on it (but) we don’t want to announce it yet,” Dunwody told the commission. “It’s an exciting venture, a real challenging one.”
The building, on the triangle bound by Cotton, Cherry and First streets, was first built in 1941 for Bankers Health and Life Insurance Co. The company was founded by P.L. Hay, whose heirs donated his Georgia Avenue mansion, a National Historic Landmark called the Johnston-Felton-Hay House, to the Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation.
Dunwody said he can remember when his father, architect William Elliott Dunwody IV, had an office there on the seventh floor.
In 2007, the city annex building was named in honor of Willie C. Hill, Macon’s first black resident to be elected to City Council.
Dunwody served on City Council with Hill. He said the two had a “very harmonious relationship” and that expects the developer will “honor the previous uses and names because it’s woven into Macon’s history.”
Work on the building has been ongoing for most of this year.
The property was purchased in April 2018 by Valdosta-based developer Integrity Development Partners Cherry Holdings. Before that, in July 2017, the City of Macon deeded the property to the Macon-Bibb County Urban Development Authority.
The proposed design for the hotel was unanimously approved by the commission, with board member Tim Jones absent.
In other business, the commission approved the Rescue Mission of Middle Georgia’s application for conditional use for a “shelter and residential recovery center and life change center” on Zebulon Road where the old Hephzibah Children’s Home once was.
Earlier this month, a company called Prodigal Sons & Daughters Behavioral Health Services LLC applied for a conditional use permit to operate an in-patient treatment program for youth “struggling with addiction, criminal thinking and mild to moderate mental health issues,” according to the application. The company plans to move in at the Hazel Street facility where the Rescue Mission is set to move from in coming months.
Representatives for the behavioral health service were told by the commission that state law requires notice of at least six months before approval can be granted.
At Monday’s meeting, Pat Chastain, the Rescue Mission’s executive director, apparently quelled concerns about the relocation.
In a summary attached to the application, planning and zoning staff stated that if the Rescue Mission “is intended to serve as a rehabilitation center for clients with drug or alcohol addictions,” then it is subject to the law requiring a six-month waiting period.
“What we work on is the heart condition,” Chastain said after telling the commission the facility has no trained psychiatrists, psychologists or medical doctors. “We are anything but a drug treatment facility. We do not handle that. We are about introducing people to Jesus Christ.”
Chastain said he is not concerned about residents’ addiction. “I want to know about your relationship with Christ,” he said. “It’s the only thing that we have. … We don’t convert them, God does.”
If someone needs medical treatment, Chastain said, “We have partners in this organization and we give those to them.”
Wimberly Treadwell, board member at the Rescue Mission, said, “if someone is in need of treatment before our program, we send them off.”
This story was originally published August 27, 2019 at 5:00 AM.
