Booming BullStreet hitting throttle.

Eighteen months after a fire threatened its existence, the renovated Babcock Building will welcome its first residents next month.

A 14-unit portion of the planned $55 million, 208-unit luxury apartment complex at the 254,000-square-foot building, which formerly housed S.C. State Hospital patients, will open the first week in April.

Other sections of the building, which featured two dining halls and included 12 connected buildings, will open during the next year, said Hugh Shytle, co-founder and president of Richmond, Va.-based developer Clachan Properties.

The luxury apartments at The Babcock, ranging from one to three bedrooms, feature more than 100 different floor plans.

"This building is massive and Byzantine and very complicated, so it's been a challenge the whole way," Shytle said. "The fire just added another element."

The anxiety after first learning of the September 2020 fire that destroyed the Babcock Building's iconic cupola was soon replaced by relief when it became apparent that firefighters had contained the damage to a sturdily built middle section.

"We were terrified," Shytle said. "The initial reports we got were that it was a devastating blow, and we really were quite concerned that we had lost so much historic fabric that an adaptive reuse project couldn't get done. But we hadn't lost so much fabric that we couldn't put it back together."

The Babcock Building's transformation is the largest and most visible piece of a rapidly transforming BullStreet District, the 181-acre, mixed-use site of the state's former mental hospital. The rumble of heavy equipment pings off the spines of steel skeletons rising from the ground all over the urban campus seven years into what Greenville-based master developer Hughes Development Corp. initially envisioned as a 20-year buildout.

"BullStreet is a project that builds on itself," said Chandler Cox, Hughes Development project manager. "There were projects early on, when we first started construction in 2015, and they've slowly all built on themselves. You feel the density that's coming together. You're...