Joel Barrett has a vision for the former St. Thomas the Apostle school, though it will take years for that vision to come to life.
The founder and managing partner of 43 North Real Estate wants to turn the long-vacant former Catholic school and daycare into 18 market-rate apartments. Standing amid peeling paint and fallen ceiling tiles, Barrett and his team — project manager Lily Loveless and finance manager Eric Bonsignore — aren’t concerned by the state of the three-story building, which has been vacant for more than a decade.
Instead, they can already envision the apartments in the former classrooms. They want to retain the windows and wood trim, maybe a portion of chalkboard or another hint to the building’s past. The firm carved out a space for itself in the development world, working with historic tax credits to rejuvenate older buildings. Most are smaller projects that don’t fit the scale preferred by prominent residential developers…