Tucked in the back of the maze of old brick buildings that makes up the Urban Place complex along New Holland Avenue is a former Civil War-era stable destined to become the hub of a new hotel.

Until recently, Barry J. Baldwin, the developer of Urban Place, and his daughter Jill Fanning, the company's director of facilities, had hoped to have the Cork Factory Hotel open by this summer.

Metal studs already define the lobby and rooms on four floors of the 50,000-square-foot hotel complex, and work is under way on a restaurant and bar.

"We just made the decision [to delay the opening] a couple of weeks ago," Baldwin said. "We decided rather than open up partially, we'd wait."

But that doesn't include the former stable, which will become a 4,000-square-foot event facility, with its own catering kitchen and covered outdoor veranda.

"Our first wedding will be Sept. 26," Fanning said, adding that the bride-to-be for that reception is Lindsey Dukeman, who helps manage the Baldwin family properties.

When the hotel opens next year on March 1, it will feature 75 guest accommodations, 22 of them suites.

Everything will be finished well before the hotel opens, Baldwin said, which will give plenty of time for training and booking the event facility.

He expects the hotel, with its proximity to downtown and convenient access to Route 30, will attract tourists and commercial travelers along with people who need a place to stay close to Lancaster General Hospital.

He also expects some overflow traffic from the Lancaster County Convention Center and adjoining Marriott hotel.

"If they have a larger convention here ... and there are only 300 rooms [at the Marriott], where are all the guests going to stay?" he said. "We're going to be one of the closer hotels. ... Not only that. We're going to be a first-class hotel, and with third-class pricing."

The hotel's name emphasizes its historical foundation, as does its design, with its exposed brickwork and wooden beams.

"We're trying to keep as much exposed as we can," Fanning said.

"Even when we did the bathrooms, we left it exposed above," Baldwin added.

Old photographs of the factory and other historical sites around Lancaster will be used to decorate the rooms, Fanning said.

"It's got character. It's got class. ... There's not another hotel like this," said Randy Howat, vice president of Inns of Distinction, a management company that specializes in such historical properties as the Gettysburg Hotel and Independence Park in Philadelphia, and plans to run the Cork Factory Hotel.

The five buildings that make up the hotel date from the 1860s, 1870s and 1880s, Baldwin said, and are the oldest in the entire Urban Place complex.

They were originally the site of what became the Lancaster Cork Works, which Armstrong, then a Pittsburgh cork manufacturer, purchased in 1893, a couple of years before formally changing its name to Armstrong Cork and several years before building its first flooring plant on Liberty Street.

Armstrong sold the complex to Kerr Glass in the mid-1960s, Baldwin said, and he purchased it in December 2004.

A complex project
Urban Place was in need of redevelopment when he bought the property, Baldwin said.

"We took down 250,000 square feet of building space to make room for parking" and landscaping, he said. "There was no green at all."

All the underground utilities and windows, many of which had been bricked over, had to be replaced.

At the outset, Baldwin sold the portion of the complex that had been Kerr Glass' corporate offices to Shirk & Sons. That building now houses Ray Shirk's insurance company, Securus Group, and The Science Factory children's museum.

The name, Urban Place, refers both to the complex's urban setting and to the fact that some of the buildings that front New Holland Avenue were designed by C. Emlen Urban, the architect responsible for the Watt & Shand and Greist buildings on Penn Square.

Baldwin said more than 80 percent of the redevelopment of the property has been completed.

That includes 46 luxury apartments on the top two floors of three of the nine buildings his family still owns.

The apartments, most between 1,100 and 1,400 square feet, but ranging up to 2,700, feature gas fireplaces, loft ceilings and two-story configurations. Rents start at $800 for one bedroom and $1,100 for two bedrooms.

"They've been renting very quickly," Fanning said. "We have 10 left."

In addition to the apartments and Cork Factory Hotel, Urban Place has about 125,000 square feet of commercial space.

About 30 percent of that space is already occupied by seven tenants, including such companies as Nxtbook Media, a digital publishing company; SiteStrux, a Web design company; Alternative Environmental Solutions, an engineering consulting firm; and the Lancaster City and County Medical Society.

About 90,000 square feet is still available for just about any commercial use except heavy industrial, Baldwin said, some of it already built out and the rest ready for finishing to the tenants' specifications.

"The economy is bad, so it's hard to get it occupied," he said. "But then we were only ready to rent a few months ago. ... It's a nice location, pricewise. People are looking for savings, and we can give it to them."

Urban Place, along with Burle Business Park, is within the revised boundaries of Lancaster's Keystone Innovation Zone, which will allow qualified tenants to apply for tax breaks, and Baldwin said he thinks that will help fill the space.

The Cork Factory Hotel, which will be the final piece of the redevelopment project, is the oldest part of the complex.

"We're actually working back in time," Fanning said.

A family affair
Unlike most projects of this scale, financing for Urban Place came from Baldwin himself.

"This whole project was done with my own money," he said.

He did have help from his family, a partnership that includes Fanning; Baldwin's wife, Linda; son Ned and his wife, Jennifer; and daughter April Wilkinson and her husband, Ryan. Son-in-law Tom Fanning, of the law firm Kling & Fanning, is the family's corporate attorney.

Except for the drywalling and the roofing, all the work on the project has been done by employees of Baldwin's primary business, Narvon-based B.J. Baldwin Electric, which employs between 400 and 500 workers.

Baldwin started the business in 1973, and it now includes an excavating division and such subsidiaries as Williamsport Electric; Miller Electric, York; an office in Deer Lake; and a partnership with Andy Fletcher in Lancaster Electric.

Most of the company's business is in heavy commercial, industrial and commercial projects, both inside and outside the United States, Baldwin said, including such diverse activities as installing cell-phone towers and running the fiber-optic cable for the security cameras being installed in downtown Lancaster.

"We own other investment properties throughout Pennsylvania and Maryland," Baldwin added, including Wheatland Place, a 66,000-square-foot office complex with its own ballroom rental space on Wheatland Avenue.

More information about the Cork Factory Hotel and Urban Place, with photographs, can be found at http://www.urbanplacelancaster.com.

---

Dennis Larison is editor of the business section and can be reached by telephone at 291-8753 or by e-mail at dlarison@lnpnews.com.