Pair of historic properties in downtown Wilmington go up for sale

Two historic properties in downtown Wilmington have been listed for sale.

According to a listing on CommercialExchange.com, the City Club of Wilmington, also known as the deRosset House, at 23 N. Second St. and St. Thomas Preservation Hall at 208 Dock St. are on the market as part of a package deal listed at $7.5 million.

Both buildings, which are owned by Jonathan Weiss and David Topping of TopWeiss LLC, are prominent structures downtown.

The deRosset house, which dates to 1841 and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, was built as a home for Dr. Armand John DeRosset III, "a physician, merchant and entrepreneur," according to the listing.

By the 1990s the building had fallen into disrepair, although in the early and mid 1990s its expansive porch hosted some of the first performances of Wilmington's long-running Cape Fear Shakespeare theater troupe. After extenstive renovations it became the private City Club, opening in 1998, according to the listing.

St. Thomas Preservation Hall is a former Catholic church first built in 1846 and, according to the listing, is a forerunner of the Basilica Shrine of St. Mary at Fifth and Ann streets downtown. It remained a church until it was officially deconsecrated in 1979.

In 1982, the building hosted the St. Thomas Celebration of the Arts, an event many have pointed to as a turning point in Wilmington’s cultural history.

Weiss and Topping of TopWeiss LLC bought St. Thomas about 10 years ago, and in recent decades the building has served as an event space, mostly hosting weddings, although the Chatham Rabbits folk band played a two-night stand there earlier this year.

The listing agent for the sale is Terry Espy of Wilmington's Momentum Companies. She said interest has been brisk.

"I've had at least five different groups reach out" since the properties were listed April 1, Espy said. "One person asked, 'At the price it's listed, what's wrong with it?' I said, 'What's wrong with it I guess is that it's not in Charleston,'" S.C.

Topping and Weiss, Espy said, have met their goal with the property, which was "to preserve it, enhance it, get it up to where it is now." They now want to move on to other things, she said.

What direction a buyer might take the properties is unknown, but "the focus is to keep it a Wilmington diamond," Espy said. "Riding on the heels of us being ranked in the top 10 as foodie destination," she added, one possibility for the City Club might be for a new owner to bring in a celebrity chef and keep it private, but with more opportunities for the public to visit or eat there.

This article originally appeared on Wilmington StarNews: City Club of Wilmington, St. Thomas Preservation Hall for sale