In anticipation of our return this fall to a full color-glossy magazine celebrating the biggest and best construction projects in Southwest Washington, we are turning back the pages this summer. Over the next several months, we’ll be looking back at some of our most exciting and catalyzing projects from the Vancouver Business Journal’s past two decades of Top Projects magazines and special publications.
From Top Projects 2017, we feature Our Heroes Place, the five-story “Ed” and “Dollie” towers located on East 13th Street and East Mill Plain Boulevard in Downtown Vancouver. The towers are named for famed local philanthropists Ed and Dollie Lynch, who supported high-profile organizations such as Fort Vancouver National Trust, Identity Clark County, Columbia Springs Foundation and the Southwest Washington Medical Center Foundation.
The towers, developed by Elie Kassab at Prestige Development, were meant to fill in the critical gap between downtown and uptown Vancouver, adding market-rate and luxury residential apartments and ground floor retail.
The project was beleaguered with delays that reflected the tough commercial construction market of the late last decade – a skilled labor shortage, spikes in materials costs and international tariffs. While the project was projected to cost $12,460,000 when it broke ground in February of 2017, it actually came in more than $10 million over, said Kassab.
The Ed Tower finally celebrated its official grand opening last December, and Dollie with its luxury apartments and penthouses, planned to follow. “Dollie Tower was finished this year and we already have five units leased and occupied,” Kassab said.
