The third and final construction phase for the swanky C&O Row townhomes is complete, bringing to an end a several-year housing project that was not without its controversy.
“We are completely sold out, occupied, and moved in,” says Tom Ridley, vice president of sales for homebuilder Evergreen Construction. “We are done and closed out on C&O Row.”
Some questioned the decision to put luxury housing next to a defunct downtown coal tower from the beginning. The site, abandoned since 1986, had been host to a double homicide and apparent suicide in the early 2000s. During home construction in October 2017, a worker fell to his death down a C&O Row elevator shaft.
Still, developers believed demand would emerge and vowed to clean up the abandoned industrial portions of the site and create a private park alongside the high-end housing stock.
Evergreen and co-builder Martin Horn launched C&O Row phase one in early 2017, developing the first 12 of 23 planned units along East Water Street. The first phase featured detached, freestanding residences starting at just under $1 million. Phase two, which included another five detached townhomes, launched the next year. Evergreen began construction on phase three’s six houses—this time an attached group—last year. The sixth and final tenants moved into the residences in October 2020, Ridley said.
The 3,000-plus-square-foot phase three luxury residences, featuring amenities like Sub-Zero refrigerators, Wolf ranges, elevators to rooftop terraces, and two-car garages, each fetch north of $1 million. Ridley describes the homes as open-concept, with tall ceilings, modern lines, and simple color palettes. Each buyer was able to customize the space to some degree, he says.
“Our company concept is to be a semi-custom and full-custom builder, so we started everyone with high-level finishes and allowed them to stick with those or have latitude to make changes,” Ridley says. “Some people made fairly extensive changes.”
