Demolition of the Fink & Skopp building in Downtown Fresno continued during a rainy Wednesday. Photo by Gabriel Dillard

After being delayed for more than a year, the demolition of the Fink & Skopp building in Downtown Fresno started last week as crews began to dismantle the more than 100-year-old building that saw time as a furniture store, brokerage firm and began its life as the ground floor of the Sequoia Hotel.

The property owner has been mum about plans for the lot as demolition continues, but talk of a possible hotel has some looking forward to a new future for the lot that brings it full circle.

Work began on the north side of the building located near the corners of Tulare and Van Ness avenues — a structure with prominent red brick arches that was reduced from a multi-story building to a single story in the 1960s.

The demolition — expected to take a few weeks — was delayed for 15 months after the Fresno Historic Preservation Commission denied a demolition request submitted in 2022.

At that time, the commission had the power to deny demolition requests on buildings potentially deemed historically significant.

Fresno City Councilmember Miguel Arias said Wednesday that the commission’s decision was based primarily on the uncertainty of the property’s future, citing that the property owner, Lance Kashian & Co., did not make plans for the property immediately clear.

However, following damages that took place after the 2021 purchase of Hardy’s Theater across the street by the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, the City Council revoked the Historic Commission’s allowance to award demolition permits.

Following the change in policy, the council approved the demolition unanimously in April 2023.

“When it comes to preservation I’m very, very adamant towards preserving, but the best way is to take these buildings and repurpose them for current use,” Arias said. “When we looked at this building, we evaluated that a single-story building at that corner downtown that allows for 15 stories is not valuable.”

Despite the lack of concrete plans for the future of the property, Arias said that the demolition of the Fink & Skopp building will allow the merging of two land parcels into one larger, mixed-residential-use parcel.

A message left for the owners of the property was not returned at the time of publication.

The future of that parcel will see the property develop either high-density housing, a hotel or office space. Arias said the proposed project would be anywhere from seven to ten stories.

Additionally, in order to construct an accurate representation of the space’s future, the builders must also take into consideration parking for downtown usage.

Part of the challenge has also been waiting to discover how much funding would be available from the State of California and how much of the $250 million promised to Fresno in the state budget would be available to improve infrastructure.

For more information, see the Friday print edition of The Business Journal