Medical Arts Building 1930
Exciting announcement coming Spring of 2019 about this local landmark!
The Medical Arts Building was built in 1928-1930. The building was erected at the southeast corner of South Avenue and Pershing Street at a cost of $425,000. It soon was filled to capacity, mainly with doctors, dentists and other medical-related offices. It was conveniently located near St John's Hospital, Burge Hospital and Baptist Hospital. The eight-story building was owned by bondholders under the directorship of the Greene County Medical Arts Association.
In 1944 Springfield real estate dealer O.L. Burger purchased the building. The building was at 90 percent capacity at the time of the sale. The following year Arthur Eichholz purchased the building. He owned the building for 18 years along with General Properties, a family corporation including Eichholz’s son Richard and Maurice Bilyeu. During this time the building was consistently at nearly full capacity. It was renamed the Empire Building.
“New ideas need old buildings.”
New life coming to the Medical Arts Building.
In 1963 Butler And Associates, an architectural firm, purchased the Empire from General Properties Inc. They paid over $300,000 for the building. Throughout the 1960s and through the 1970s the Empire fell on hard times. Park Plaza Development Company purchased the building in 1972. In April, 1974, each of the nine remaining tenants received letters asking them to vacate the building. Empire Bank had acquired the property through a foreclosure. Empire Bank had a second mortgage on the building and a first mortgage on its parking lot. Great Southern Savings had a first mortgage on the building. The Empire was vacated on May 1, 1974. In 1976 Diversified Land and Cattle Company acquired the building. Partners James Crawford and Darence Clenginger were the first occupants. In 1978 the Springfield City Directory listed the building’s name as Park Central Towers. In 1977 Burrell Behavorial Health moved into the building, where they stayed until 1984. By 1980 there were several tenants in Park Central Tower. The 1985 City Directory shows Great Southern Insurance occupying several floors, the Greene County Democratic Committee in the ground floor and miscellaneous other businesses in the building. From approximately 1990 Great Southern Bank occupied the entire building.
Fast Forward to 2020: New life in…THE MOXY!
The first thing you’ll notice when you walk into the new Moxy Hotel, which is slated to open in downtown Springfield in the summer of 2020, is the lack of a traditional check-in. Need to get your room key? See the bartender. “This project will speak to future generations,” says Tim O’Reilly, CEO of O’Reilly Hospitality. “This is more entertainment-focused.” Thatʼs an understatement.
Moxy—one of Marriott’s new boutique hotel brands—is a splashy, party-themed economy hotel geared toward young travelers and adventurers looking to have, as O’Reilly calls it, “an entertaining experience.” The hotel’s website is a mix of black and hot pink with images scrolling by showing hotel guests reveling in the nightlife. The tagline here is “Play On.” Wi-Fi is free. The coffee is fresh, and craft cocktails are waiting. The boutique concept is a relatively new one for Marriott. Moxy Hotels debuted in 2014 with the first location opening in Milan. Since then, Moxy Hotels have popped up in major cities including New York City, Chicago, Memphis, Atlanta, New Orleans, Seattle and Denver. When O’Reilly pitched the idea to open Moxy’s third Midwest location in Springfield, he had some convincing to do. “We had a lot of conversation,” he says. “This is pretty different from their normal strategy where they focus on big urban markets.” To prove to the Marriott team that the Queen City was ideal for something edgy like Moxy Hotels, O’Reilly invited them to tour the historic building he planned to renovate. It worked. “When they visited downtown and saw the building and the historical significance, they became big fans of the project,” he says. Eventually, Marriott issued the Moxy franchise for the project.