The moment I walk onto the American Hotel property at 221 E. Broadway, SL Residential Project Superintendent Bob Boyle asks me what I want. (He’s in charge of building the condos for Lennar next door.)

I tell him I’m looking at the Hotel–which is vacant and now owned by the city’s Redevelopment Agency–and Boyle says immediately: “Do you want to buy it?”

Maybe not today.

“It’s actually a very small footprint,” says developer Dan Peterson, who resurrected the historic Middough Brothers-Insurance Exchange Building across the street. “I’m sure if it were in a little bit better shape, somebody would have done something with it. But it’s so small that the amount of money to retrofit it would not be worth it.”

That’s most of the problem. “It’s the oldest building around here,” Boyle adds. “I had a guy wanting to buy the fire escape.” And that’s the rest of the problem: its age.

A block away is Acres of Books, a landmark Long Beach business in a partially-historic building which may be sold and partially demolished. It works; as we’ve previously reported, Acres of Books is one of the world’s great bookstores.

All of the 1905 American Hotel is a city historic landmark, according to city officials–but it’s also vacant, and falling apart.

“The folks at Lennar, one of their cement trucks backed up onto the sidewalk and collapsed the sidewalk,” says newly-minted Director of Planning and Building Craig Beck, who was promoted earlier this week.

An investigation revealed that the Hotel basement actually continues under the sidewalk–which shouldn’t have collapsed it–and that some of the joists between the first floor and the basement are rotten. The joists are what hold up the building.

“These are rough numbers, but just to make that building back to what it was, you’re looking at about $10.5 million,” Beck says. And what do you get for that huge investment? A building that probably won’t pay for itself, because it’s too small.

“At one point, I looked into converting it to artists’ lofts and you could only do about 14 of them,” Beck says. “The economic costs to make it into artists’ lofts just didn’t pencil.”

So what’s the solution? A while back, the city got a $3 million Metropolitan Transportation Authority grant to pay for a parking lot next door to the American Hotel–on a vacant lot at the southwest corner of Long Beach Boulevard and Broadway.

City officials managed to move that money around to pay for another project–the rather nondescript parking structure on Third Street between Long Beach Boulevard and Pine Avenue, which they intend to augment by another one or two levels.

Thusly freed–somehow–to tackle the vacant lot and the American Hotel together, city folk hope to save part of the structure–chiefly the facade, which has huge arched windows and great polished brickwork–and build something with it, on the whole piece of land.

“Absolutely,” Beck says. “We would use that land and integrate it into the plan.”

Now all they need is to square it with the historic preservation people, and find someone to build it–preferably before the American Hotel winds up in Bob Boyle’s lap.

“The mortar’s crystallizing,” Boyle says–meaning that the stuff that holds the bricks together is turning back into sand. “I’m waiting for an earthquake, and it to fall on my [construction] trailer.”

Tags: acres of books, American Hotel, Bob Boyle, California, Craig Beck, Dan Peterson, Lennar, Long Beach, Long Beach historic landmark, Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Middough Brothers-Insurance Exchange Building, Redevelopment Agency, SL Residential, Southern California, The District Weekly, Theo Douglas