The old Camelot Club in Chase South Tower may turn into high end housing

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Wampold buys Chase South Tower in downtown Baton Rouge, will convert to residential, retail, offices



Baton Rouge Advocate

Baton Rouge developer Mike Wampold, who already owns four downtown properties, has purchased the troubled Chase South Tower, with plans for significant upgrades to convert it into a mixed-use property with retail, residential and office space.

La Hermana Mayor LLC, a company controlled by Wampold, purchased the building at 451 Florida St. in a deal that was filed Thursday evening with the East Baton Rouge Clerk of Court’s office. The seller was New York-based Florida Street Holdings LLC.

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Wampold has owned the adjoining Chase North Tower since 2003, when he paid $19.7 million for the office building. While that 210,000-square-foot building is nearly 90 percent occupied, the 330,000-square-foot Chase South Tower has an occupancy rate of about 75 percent.

“Downtown has been good to us over the last 20 years,” Wampold said. “We’re looking for space to lease downtown and we feel confident we can bring the occupancy rate in the South Tower back into the 90s by repurposing and making it mixed use.”

Wampold also owns the City Plaza and II City Plaza office buildings and the Watermark Baton Rouge hotel on Third Street. City Plaza, a 170,000-square-foot office building at 445 North Blvd., has an occupancy rate in the high 90s, while the 260,000-square-foot II City Plaza at 400 Convention St., is fully occupied.

Wampold plans to turn the South Tower's ground floor into retail, with restaurant space. Between 100 to 150 apartments will be put in the building; this could include high-end units that would go where the Camelot Club once was, Wampold said. The Camelot Club was a private club that topped the 21-story building until it closed in March 2016.

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The Chase South Tower has been open since 1967. Some of its tenants include Chase Bank, Albemarle and the Public Affairs Research Council of Louisiana. The Baton Rouge Area Chamber and the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry have temporarily relocated into the property while they build new offices.

Albemarle has drastically reduced its presence in Baton Rouge and its lease on the property is up in 2021. Wampold said one of the motivations for the purchase of the building was to keep a significant amount of downtown office space from hitting the market all at once. “We want to be able to control that somewhat,” he said.

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