The owner of the former Hunan East building at 1460 Upper Valley Pike said he bought the restaurant almost two years ago with plans to make it a Japanese hibachi grill. But since then, he said, he's had trouble keeping plans on schedule while maintaining operations at the Chinese Gourmet, a restaurant he owns in Steubenville.
"I couldn't do two restaurants at one time with the crazy economy. It was too much to do," Chen Tian-Yi, the building owner, said. "I want to turn it into a real investment. I don't want it to just be something on my insurance and property (taxes)."
Tian-Yi bought the building in December 2010 for $135,000— its current value today, according to the Clark County Auditor’s website, even though the roof is caving in. Before its purchase, the 5,000-square-foot building had been vacant for a decade. Last year, German Twp. officials had to take action after neighboring bank employees reported seeing hundreds of cats roaming in- and outside Hunan East, said George Degenhart, township planning and zoning director.
"There was a woman … she was feeding them, a bunch of wild cats," Degenhart said. "She would go down there and drop a bag of feed off for them, and we would see the evidence of that."
Degenhart said with the help of the health department, Tian-Yi was asked to clean up the building to prevent the cats from getting access, as well as remove some eaves falling off the building that were considered a safety hazard. Degenhart said he is limited in what he can order outside state law. So far, he said the owner has been compliant with requests, and the township has emphasized he needs to take responsibility for the property.
“It’s an area that we would like to have a better position on than we do,” he said.
Tian-Yi said he’s hired contractors to fix the roof and air conditioner. A tree was removed from the property, which was being used by the cats as an access point to holes on the roof. He said the building is still structurally sound and he should still be able to renovate it to reopen as a restaurant sometime in the next six months.
