New life for former Sangamo Club?

After four years on the market, the vacant Sangamo Club building may soon have a new owner.

Local developer Corky Joyner of Joyner Construction has the 29,000-square-foot building at 227 E. Adams St. under contract with tentative plans to redevelop it into apartments.

However, Joyner is awaiting bids for remediating hazardous materials in the building and wants to have a cost estimate for the remediation before closing on the property. He said he is hoping to be able to make a final decision within the coming weeks.

While Joyner remains open to different options for the building, he said residential development is at the top of the list.

“Everything is still on the table at this point, but our initial desire is to do residential there,” he said. He estimates the building could house between 20 and 40 residential units.

Joyner said he believes there’s a market for downtown residential, particularly with the Sangamo Club’s central location.

“It’s close to the employment generators downtown – the Capitol, both the hospitals and the medical school,” Joyner said. “We wanted to do a project that was in the middle of all of them.”

The building has been vacant since the Sangamo Club closed in June 2023 after more than 133 years in business. The private dining club, which had been part of Springfield’s history since 1890, had close to 1,000 members as recently as 2016, but membership had dwindled to 250 by 2023. The Sangamo Club initially opened at 523 S. Sixth St. but had been located in the Adams Street building since 1963.

Months before the club closed, its downtown building was listed for sale by Hurwitz Enterprises in 2022 at an asking price of $1.45 million.  PNC Bank foreclosed on the property in April 2024, and the following month the property was listed with Todd P. Smith Commercial Real Estate at an asking price of $895,000. The property currently is listed at $599,000.

Joyner declined to disclose what he offered for the property, saying only that it was a “little bit less” than the current asking price.

Joyner, who has been in the construction business since 1995, recently has been focused on the apartment market. Joyner owns several local apartment complexes, including the Cobblestone Place and Ash Grove complexes, both of which are off Wabash Avenue. The company is completing construction on the Residences at Cardinal Hill complex in Rochester and has just started construction on a complex to be known as Wabash Park, located on Mercantile Drive near Wabash.

Over the course of his career, Joyner has been involved in the development of more than 800 acres of raw ground in Sangamon County, most of which was for new subdivisions. Joyner Construction, which currently has about 20 employees, also has built and owned multiple strip malls in the area.

“I’ve been doing this for a while, and I look forward to putting something downtown that will be there for years to come,” Joyner said.

Currently, Joyner owns two office buildings downtown, at 217 E. Monroe St. and 500 W. Monroe St. He said he hopes to see more developers making an investment in downtown. In particular, he’d like to see the proposed expansion of the BOS Center move forward.

“We’re hoping the convention center expansion happens,” he said. “That would be the biggest thing to happen downtown in my business career.”

Joyner said that in a perfect world, construction would begin at the Sangamo Club by the end of summer, with residents moving in by the end of summer 2027.

“That’s probably ambitious, but it’s what we hope to do,” he said.