A new owner has purchased the vacant storefronts that line the 2200 block of Shattuck Avenue in downtown Berkeley. Credit: Nico Savidge/Berkeleyside
A historic block that has floundered for years in the heart of downtown Berkeley could be poised for a turnaround after a new owner closed on the property this month.
Los Angeles-based Flying Horse Investments purchased the ground-floor retail that spans the entire block of Shattuck Avenue between Allston Way and Kittredge Street, a nearly 30,000-square-foot property that was sold separately from the Hotel Shattuck Plaza above it.
Every one of the block’s 11 storefronts is empty, making it a more than 300-foot expanse of grimy, papered-over windows. Many have sat vacant for years — the property’s focal point is the marquee of Shattuck Cinemas, which closed in 2022, while faded signs are all that remains of bygone tenants like a tea shop and bike parking station that cleared out well before then.
Flying Horse Investments Managing Principal Eric Shulman told Berkeleyside in an interview that new businesses could open in freshly renovated spaces as soon as next fall. Shulman declined to say how much his firm paid for the property.
“We think this is really going to jump-start a lot of activity in the downtown district,” he said.
City and business leaders are ecstatic about the sale, which they hope will usher in a new era for the 2200 block of Shattuck.
“It’s a big, big deal to get that whole block finally renovated and activated,” Downtown Berkeley Association CEO John Caner said in an interview.
In an emailed statement, Mayor Adena Ishii wrote, “I’m thrilled that Flying Horse Investments is bringing new life to these central storefronts. This deal, along with the dedicated work of our Office of Economic Development and the Downtown Berkeley Business District, will help revitalize our downtown and draw people back to the heart of Berkeley.”
Property has hung in limbo amid development battles
An empty lot along Harold Way, the site of a stalled apartment development, occupies the back half of the 2200 block of Shattuck Avenue in downtown Berkeley. Credit: Ximena Natera/Berkeleyside
Known to generations of Berkeley residents as the site of the J.F. Hink and Son Department Store, which long anchored the ground floor of the more than century-old Shattuck Hotel building, the storefronts emptied over the past decade as the property hung in a complex real estate limbo.
The entire block — the hotel, Shattuck Avenue storefronts and now-demolished office buildings along Harold Way — once made up a single parcel, but it was carved into two and then three separate properties over the years.
In 2012, when the Shattuck retail and offices were one property, then-owner Hill Street Realty kicked off one of Berkeley’s most notorious development battles when it put forward a plan to build an 18-story apartment building on the Harold Way side of the block. The project was approved after years of fierce debate, but never built. Hill Street Realty scrapped the plans in 2020, saying they had become too expensive.
A man walks past vacant storefronts on the 2200 block of Shattuck Avenue in a 2023 file photo. Little has changed on the block since. Credit: Ximena Natera/Berkeleyside
Hill Street Realty split the property the following year, keeping the Shattuck Avenue retail and selling off the Harold Way side of the block to another developer who won city approval for a smaller housing project. But the two parcels were still connected: When that developer, today known as Article Student Living, demolished the Harold Way offices in 2023, it removed the roof and walls at the back end of some of the Shattuck storefront, rendering them unusable until those structural elements were rebuilt. That process took until January of this year, Shulman said.
Meanwhile, the 187-unit housing development stalled after interest rates and construction costs soared. The west side of the block is today a deep pit with no sign of activity, one of the most prominent scars from a downturn in housing construction after years when thousands of new apartments were built in Berkeley’s core.
Building could open to new tenants in a year
Shulman said his firm saw tremendous untapped potential in the Shattuck retail — which sits a block from UC Berkeley and just across Allston Way from the Downtown Berkeley BART station — regarding it as a prime property being “handcuffed” by its circumstances.
Flying Horse expects to spend at least the next six months renovating the interiors of the storefronts while marketing to new tenants, he said, and plans to restore both the Shattuck Cinemas marquee and a large clock believed to date from the 1970s that stands on the sidewalk. It could take just as long for new businesses to build out their spaces in the storefronts, he said.
Shulman envisions attracting restaurants and retail to the new spaces — a mix that would be similar to what the block hosted years ago — as well as a gym or medical uses.
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