One year and five months after finding itself in the path of a deadly tornado, the Boo Cat Club is looking sharp. Last weekend, staffers hosted the first event on site—a wedding—since 100-mph winds sent a giant sycamore crashing through the front of the building, ripping through brick like a pair of powerful scissors. Looking at it now, you’d never know just how badly the 119-year-old building had been damaged.
It helps that the 10,000 square-foot event space is owned by Pat and Carol Schuchard of Schuchard Projects, who are no strangers to tricky historic rehabs—even if this was their first tornado. A retired WashU art professor, Pat Schuchard is enamored with the building, which was designed by Louis Spiering as the first home of the St. Louis Artists’ Guild. “Tennessee Williams put on some of his first plays here,” he says of the theater, added in 1916. “Through 1970, they exhibited great artists: Max Beckmann, Thomas Hart Benton.”
But when the Schuchards first acquired it, in 2013, the place was a wreck. It’s located in North City’s Academy neighborhood, which saw significant disinvestment in the 1960s and ‘70s. The artists’ guild had sold the building to a community-focused nonprofit in 1973, and what the Schuchards encountered suggested they were more focused more on their mission than building maintenance. A drop ceiling covered the skylight and “some of the most beautiful mold blooms you’ve ever seen,” Schuchard recalls. The couple got to work. “Of all our projects, this was probably the most complicated and the most time consuming,” he says.
Then, 12 years later, thanks to that tornado, they had to do it all over again. The second go-round brought its own frustrations—namely, insurance companies. They got a small check from their insurer at first (“to get you started,” Schuchard says they were told) but everything after that took months on end, which left their contractors waiting to get paid, too—even as the club had to refund fees from everyone whose events were canceled. “We’re still waiting for payments from the insurance company,” Schuchard says. “That’s been the hardest part of this.”…