AURORA | When late summer rolls around, visitors to Havana Street and East Third Avenue won’t have to wonder what the heck that ugly building with the bumpy roof is.
By then, Fan Fare will be gone.
Last month, demolition crews started work toward tearing the building down, marking the beginning of the end for a unique property that has confounded city leaders and neighborhood residents for almost half a century.
The Aurora City Council voted late last year to pay up to $4 million for the building, its demolition and property. City officials hope that once the building is gone, they’ll be able to find a buyer for the property who will redevelop it into something useful.
Michael Sheldon, a lawyer for the investment group that owned Fan Fare before selling it to the city last year, said the project will include federal and state inspectors making sure the asbestos inside the building is being properly mitigated. That asbestos has been one of the stumbling blocks that stopped the building from being razed or refurbished in recent years.
“It’s a full on, very expensive plan to do this,” Sheldon said.
Because of the breadth of work crews have to do, and because they won’t know the exact scale of the project until inspectors get in and determine what needs to be done, Sheldon said it’s tough to say exactly when the project will wrap up.
“We would be hopeful that it would be complete this summer,” he said.
Fan Fare opened in 1961 as “Fan Fair Discount City,” one of the first indoor shopping malls in the area. The building was a bit of an architectural marvel at the time because rather than using interior support beams to hold up its bulbous roof, it used exterior supports jutting from the sides of the building. That design meant lots of space inside the 118,00-square-foot building unencumbered by support columns.
But even with all that space, the indoor mall didn’t last.
In 1965, Fan Fair Discount City closed and since then, the building has largely sat empty and decaying.
In 1982, Sheldon’s group purchased the site and renamed it “Fanfare.” City documents have since called the building “Fan Fare,” though it’s name remains a point of contention for many longtime residents.
Since it sold 31 years ago, what to do with Fan Fare has been a long, slow and frustrating process for seemingly everyone involved.
There have been several ideas for what to do with the building, including knock it down and build high-rise condominiums on the spot, use the ample space for storage, or turn it into some kind of museum.
But every idea fell flat.
Many at city hall have argued in recent years that Fan Fare’s presence has hindered redeveloped of that stretch of Havana Street. Eventually, city officials stepped in last year and opted to buy the building using a loan from the city’s water department.
For the people who live near Fan Fare, hearing that the end is near for Fan Fare is welcome news.
Donnell Ford, 30, has lived in an apartment across Geneva Street from the backside of fan Fare for six years.
The building is ugly, Ford said, and it won’t be missed.
“I’d rather see something new, something more productive,” he said.
Brian Haddad, the landlord at 373 Geneva St., said he regularly fields questions from interested tenants wondering just what that weird building is.
What it is, he said, is an eyesore and the neighborhood won’t be sad to see the building scraped away.
“Everyone is happy and excited,” he said.