By Ron DaParma
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette • April 6, 2005

When Aaron Stauber first visited the Ewart Building on Liberty Avenue, he was afraid to go in.

It was 1998, and the eight-story building had been vacant and boarded up for 20 years. Stauber, managing director of Rugby Realty Co. Inc., was looking at it as a potential purchase for the Teterboro, N.J.-based firm. Rugby had entered the Pittsburgh market with a splash by taking over the Gulf Tower, and wanted to expand on its local presence.

As he walked through the dilapidated shell of the Ewart, Stauber’s fear faded and he saw only one thing: Opportunity. He sold his colleagues on the idea, and two years later, the building at 925 Liberty Ave., Downtown, was renovated and filled with an eclectic mix of tenants, from attorneys to technology firms.

The Ewart became the first in a series of acquisitions in the Cultural District by Rugby, and with its recent buy of the Frick Building, it is one of the largest property owners Downtown, controlling more than a million square feet of the Golden Triangle.

Not bad for a company that started out as a subsidiary of a clothier.

Rugby was formed in 1980 as an offshoot of A&E Stores Inc. The parent company owned more than 100 clothing stores in the Northeast, including Strawberry’s, Pay Half and Bolton’s, and created Rugby to manage the commercial real estate it had acquired along the way.

By 1987, after Gulf Oil was bought by Chevron and vacated its landmark headquarters building at Grant Street and Seventh Avenue, Rugby was ready for a large-scale acquisition. The company bought the building for $28.8 million, and began the massive task of updating and converting it from a single-tenant building to multi-tenant use. The renovation took 10 years, going floor by floor as new tenants were signed, eventually bringing the building to more than 90 percent occupancy.

As the Gulf Tower renovation was winding up, Stauber came on board as managing director to increase A&E’s commercial real estate holdings. A New Yorker, Stauber had been commuting to Pittsburgh since 1989 as a managing director with Taylor Development Group, which worked with former Downtown real estate developer and investor Richard Penzer, so he was familiar with the city.

When Stauber came across the Ewart Building, there was talk in the air of a new convention center and new stadiums — changes that could boost the value of the Ewart and all of its neighbors. Rugby bought the building in June 1998, and finished renovating it the following year. Within months of the completion of the renovation, it was 100 percent leased.

Buoyed by that success, Rugby went on a shopping spree in the Cultural District. Maurice Ades, one of the principals of A&E, moved over to Rugby as executive vice president, and he and Stauber engineered the purchases of six buildings on the 900 block of Penn Avenue from 2000 through 2002.

Each was renovated with a goal of providing modern amenities while maintaining historical character. Along with the buildings, Rugby bought “all the parking lots we could get our hands on,” in order to offer parking as an amenity to tenants.

In Stauber’s view, the area’s growth since the company bought the Ewart has justified Rugby’s confidence. “The vibrancy that’s happening in the Cultural District, it’s out of control,” he said with a burst of enthusiasm.

Now the company that made its Pittsburgh debut at Grant and Seventh has driven another tent peg into Grant Street, taking over the Frick Building, a historic monument to the days when Pittsburgh was the center of the nation’s steel industry. The 103-year-old, 340,000-square-foot tower brings their Downtown portfolio to 1.2 million square feet.

Rugby already has begun renovating and restoring the building, working to upgrade the elevators and the common areas, with their abundance of marble and brass. “We’re going to give it all the attention it deserves, and then some,” Stauber said.

The building is about 75 percent occupied, and Rugby plans to market the remaining space to tenants similar to those already there: attorneys and others in the legal community; investment and banking firms; and anyone else in search of a “prestigious address” in the center of town.

In its first week of ownership, Rugby already had a long list of potential tenants waiting to lease space, Ades said. He credited not only the Frick name itself, but Rugby’s management team, which operates as a separate company, 110 Gulf Associates LP.

“I have met every single tenant in that building,” he said. “We really treat our tenants like they’re our partners.”

While the modernize-and-preserve model has worked well for Rugby so far, it made a recent purchase that doesn’t fit that model — 817 Liberty Ave., home to a contact lens retailer. A simple one-story building, it will not require the major renovation that has characterized their other purchases.

“Every once in a while,” Stauber said, “you want to buy an easy building.”