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Indianapolis-based Pearl Cos. bought the structures on the former hospital grounds in the Peabody Darst Webbe neighborhood on the edge of Lafayette Square from a company affiliated with developer Gilded Age, led by Chris Goodson. Gilded Age in 2005 had rehabbed the main hospital building into 104 condominiums now known as the Georgian.

Other buildings in the complex were .

But the remaining four structures that sit along 14th Street between the Georgian condos and the Palladium event space were never redone.

Pearl Capital Management President Jeff Tegethoff said the company expects to begin work on the $16 million project next month and have the apartments ready for occupancy in about a year.

“This entire complex holds such a significant part of the daily history of St. Louis,� said Joel Fuoss, principal of Trivers Associates, the architect for the project. “With this moving forward, it can complete the reuse of this complex begun over a decade ago while creating new, unique, and well-designed places for people to live.�

The City Hospital site dates to the 1840s, when the city founded it in response to a major cholera outbreak. The original hospital was destroyed by a fire in 1856 and rebuilt, only to be destroyed by the Great Cyclone of 1896.

The hospital was rebuilt in the early 20th century in Georgian Revival style. When the Homer G. Phillips Hospital on the north side shut down in 1979, the City Hospital complex’s infrastructure was strained under the weight of more demand for its services. The city decided to move it to Delmar Boulevard in the ’80s, and the complex was shut down and abandoned in 1985.

Among the oldest buildings still standing on the campus is the 1907-built Commissioner’s Building, included in Pearl’s apartment plans.

Also part of the rehab will be the ambulance garage and the clinic building, built in 1921, and the services building, built in 1940.

Rent for the apartments, which are almost entirely one-bedroom, will start at $985 per month. The five 2-bedroom apartments will charge around $1,600 per month, Tegethoff said. A purchase price for the buildings wasn’t disclosed.

An existing tax increment financing district established for the initial redevelopment is expected to cover some development costs, as are $5 million in federal historic tax credits and already-approved state historic tax credits being transferred from the prior owner to Pearl.

Pearl entered the St. Louis market last year with a high-profile proposal to redevelop a long-vacant lumberyard in the Dogtown neighborhood into a mixed-use apartment building with a ground-floor grocery store. That project’s store, Fields Foods, is affiliated with Goodson, which is how Tegethoff and Goodson began conversations about the City Hospital deal. A Fields Foods grocery store is located at 1500 Lafayette Avenue, across the street from the Georgian and the planned new apartments.