On Point | Travis Soule aims to breathe new life into old mill structures with his Island Point project in Lewiston

At the falls of the Androscoggin River in downtown Lewiston a few weeks ago, a bald eagle circled overhead just as developer Travis Soule was showing a potential investor around a former mill building that will be part of his proposed $21.5 million mixed-used redevelopment project, Island Point.

"It seemed like such a planned moment, like I had given someone a signal to 'cue the eagle,'" Soule quips. "It was just stunning."

And, he says, the setting was a far cry from the sullied river that so many longtime Lewiston residents still clearly remember, when toxic effluents from textile mills and other businesses went directly into the water.

Today, he says, the future success of the Lewiston-Auburn area may lie in part in the mills, but not in the mill business itself. He sees the former Cowan and Libbey mills and the river along which they lie as prime real estate that will soon embrace increasingly prosperous residents, visitors, restaurants, retail spaces and corporate offices.

The Island Point project is just getting underway and hasn't even had an official groundbreaking yet, though some important environmental and structural reports are nearing completion. But while it may be a young project, it's also a large one that joins a number of other development efforts in what continues to be a growing and economically promising part of the state.

According to June figures from Lewiston officials, the total new investment in the city for projects that have started since January 2000 and are scheduled to be completed in the next two years is $288 million ˆ— with $176 million of that in the downtown area alone. In addition, the Maine Department of Economic and Community Development reports that Lewiston led the state in the number of projects built that were worth more than $500,000 or that created 10 or more jobs in both 2002 and 2004.

"With the loss of mill jobs and the historical work associated with this area, it had been a struggle for a while to gain momentum on redevelopment," says Lewiston Assistant City Administrator Greg Mitchell, who takes the lead on the city's economic development projects. "But the landscape is almost changing overnight, and the Island Point project will be a dramatic part of that."

The family business
Travis Soule, who lives in New Gloucester with his wife and two children, has been away to do work in other states, but he's not from away, and that makes a difference in how the project is received and how it will affect the area, Mitchell says.

"Travis brings quite a bit to this project, with his depth of experience in redevelopment work both in Maine and out of state," Mitchell says. "But more important to us locally is that like so many developers in this area, he has deep roots in Maine and he and his family have a huge level of commitment to the Lewiston-Auburn area."

Soule's grandfather, father and three brothers all attended Bowdoin College in Brunswick, from which Soule's father recently retired. On the maternal side of the family are the Cooks, who started what is now Allied/Cook Construction, with offices in Portland and Portsmouth, N.H. "I was on construction sites pretty much my whole life," recalls Soule, age 41. "Other kids would work at McDonald's; I would lug cement blocks around. It made for long summers, but it was good for football and wrestling during the school years."

Soule broke ranks with his dad's side of the family when he went to Springfield College in Massachusetts to study political science and economics. But he came back to Maine and ended up with a job at the Liberty Group, a real estate development company in his hometown of Portland.

Roughly 10 years of working with prominent developer Michael Liberty provided Soule with plenty of experience structuring financing both for new development and redevelopment projects, Soule says. One of the biggest projects he tackled was a roughly $300 million apartment complex in Houston, Texas, along with smaller projects, several of them in the $10 million range, in Houston, Kansas City and St. Louis.

But the near-weekly travel started getting to him, he says. "Travel was great when I was single," Soule admits. "But once I started building a family, I found I would rather tear my skin off than leave my kids at home for long periods."

Closer to home
Fast forward to Lewiston, where Soule landed in early 2002 when he realized that the Portland market was too hard to break into as a new developer.

"What I looked for as a developer was a market I thought was about to burst," he says. "I saw Portland growing like crazy and running out of room to grow, and I saw the explosion going north. And that brought me to Lewiston-Auburn. If I'm a young couple with $150,000 to spend, that won't get me anything in Portland, but it can buy something really nice in Lewiston-Auburn. I get scared when I see that average folks cannot live in the towns where they work."

So Soule began investing in apartment buildings in Lewiston-Auburn, as well as looking at conversions of apartments into condominiums. Crossing the bridge between Lewiston and Auburn every day to do his work, Soule says he kept admiring the old buildings near the water and the rushing waterfall, and started becoming angry that the property there stood largely vacant and undeveloped.

"I worked in cities elsewhere where they did far more with less natural beauty," Soule says. "If you took this waterfall and those buildings and moved them, it would immediately be premier real estate somewhere else. I e-mailed pictures to a guy I worked with down in Texas, and he said his jaw dropped, because there was no way he could reproduce that in his area. What's he going to do, carve a waterfall out of nothing?"

After passing the Cowan Mill and Libbey Mill buildings for a year, Soule made an offer to owner Martin Finley. Late last year, after eight months of negotiations, the properties were put under a purchase and sale agreement through Solo Properties, the company Soule runs with Vince Lobozzo, a third-generation Lewiston-Auburn resident and business owner. (Lobozzo recently sold Neocraft Signs to focus on his work with Solo Properties and a spin-off business from Neocraft, Tri-State Flags.)

In January, Soule and Lobozzo announced the Island Point project, which is scheduled to unfold in three phases.

Phase I will include the redevelopment of the former Central Maine Power office building, located at 134 Main St., to house offices on the upper floors. On ground level will be a restaurant; a deal has already been inked for Esposito's, a popular Portland-based restaurant, to open its third location in Maine, which will be named Espo's Trattoria. Phase I also includes the redevelopment of the Cowan Mill into market-rate condominiums and possibly another restaurant. Work on Phase I is expected to begin this year and be completed in 2006.

Phase II will be the redevelopment or replacement of the Libbey Mill into market-rate residential condominiums and retail space. Unlike the Cowan Mill building, the Libbey Mill building's suitability for salvaging is unclear. The property has suffered several structural fires over the years, the most recent one in 1999. Only one Libbey Mill building remains, and it is still undergoing the final stages of a structural assessment to determine if redevelopment is a viable option, or if the building will be demolished and a new one constructed. Phase II is expected to begin in 2006 and finish up in 2007.

Phase III, which as yet has no start date, would involve the expansion of Libbey Mill to add more condominiums and perhaps a new hotel.

Soule declined to disclose details of the deal including how much he has agreed to pay for the mill properties and when he expects those transactions to close. Although the vast majority of funding has come, and will continue to come, from private sources, the city of Lewiston has played a key role as well, committing to more than $6 million in infrastructure improvements, such as road and sidewalk work, lighting improvements and landscaping.

Something old, something new
For the project, the city acquired the old Empire Theater property, which sits right on the corner of the property Soule is developing, next to the Central Maine Power office building. But the theater, which was built in 1903, is one historic site that won't be renovated for the Island Point project. It was recently demolished and the property will soon be cleared of debris to begin the construction of a surface parking lot, Mitchell says.

"There are many fond memories of the theater, but the cost of redeveloping the building would have far outweighed anything it could ever bring in for income," says Mitchell. "There was mold damage and other structural problems, and we determined, along with Travis, that it would be better to focus on the Libbey Mill building instead."

Lee Griswold, who owns the Hilton Garden Inn Auburn Riverwatch just across the river, is nearly as much of a supporter of the project as is the city of Lewiston, despite being in the neighboring city and perhaps competing with Soule's planned hotel sometime in the future. "Anything good that happens in downtown Auburn has a corresponding positive effect on development in Lewiston, and vice-versa," says Griswold, who estimates he's been involved in at least $75 million worth of development in Maine, with somewhere between a quarter and a third of his work in Lewiston-Auburn. "Travis can and should take advantage of all the good news on both sides of the river to support his development, which is certainly an ambitious project to say the least."

Griswold says, with a mix of humor and business acumen, that he is interested in seeing Soule succeed for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that the development of luxury condos means people with money moving in and being visited by friends and relatives who might stay at the Hilton Garden Inn.

"I think Travis knows the development will be some time in the making, which is good," Griswold notes. "He's going to have to have the perseverance and financial backing to weather what could be two or three economic cycles. We're at a peak right now, and I don't see anything that would derail what we're doing to develop in Lewiston-Auburn, but you never know."

There isn't a day that goes by that doesn't bring to mind the financial risks, Soule says, but he also doesn't see any reason to believe that interest in real estate investment in the area will flag seriously. In fact, he says that he sees Lewiston-Auburn as an emerging market that very much resembles Portland of 20 years ago.

Soule says that his plans for the Island Point project are far from visionary, because other people and companies are doing similar projects throughout New England. But he says it's important for him and for the city of Lewiston to make use of the old buildings while also bringing them into the new millennium, however long it takes and whatever hurdles he may yet have to encounter.

"High-end condos and retail and office spaces can be built anywhere, but you cannot manufacture 150 years of character into a building," he says. "You have these 12-foot ceilings and eight-foot windows every few feet and these beautiful, massive beams; I wanted to re-use the beauty that had been taken for granted for so long."