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The dismantling of Pyramid Construction Co., once the leader in downtown redevelopment, will continue next month with foreclosure on what was to have been among the firm’s biggest projects: the $75 million renovation of the Jefferson Arms.

Pyramid bought the 496-unit apartment building three years ago for $19 million and planned a thorough overhaul. But the company shut down in April 2008 as the result of severe money trouble. The building, originally the Jefferson Arms Hotel, has been vacant since shortly after Pyramid bought the structure and required the residents, most of them people older than 55, to move.

The foreclosure notice filed Tuesday said the Jefferson Arms will be put up for bid at noon Aug. 10 at the Civil Courts building. Citicorp, the lender in the project, said in the foreclosure notice that Jefferson Arms Building LLC, an affiliate of Pyramid, defaulted on the loan made in July 2006.

Steven Goldstein, a lawyer for Pyramid, said Wednesday that the company "is actively working in cooperation with its lenders to continue its efforts to transfer its projects to other hands."

Built in the early 20th century and named for President Thomas Jefferson, the hotel was designed, Beaux Arts style, by the Barnett, Haynes & Barnett firm, with 500 rooms. The hotel, at 415 North Tucker Boulevard, was expanded in 1928. Later, alterations reconfigured the building with studio, one-bedroom and two-bedroom apartments.

Pyramid had planned to convert the building to condos, retail space and a banquet facility.

Doug Woodruff, a principal at DFC Group Inc., said Pyramid’s deal reached last fall to sell the Jefferson Arms to Sherman Associates, a Minneapolis-based developer, fell through, leading to foreclosure by Citicorp life insurance quote.

Woodruff said his development company, partly at the request of Pyramid’s president, John Steffen, has been helping Pyramid liquidate about 25 projects once valued at $300 million.

Sherman Associates was involved with another developer in the residential conversion of the Syndicate Trust building, formerly a vacant office building in downtown St. Louis.

Six to eight Pyramid properties, including the Jefferson Arms, await disposition, Woodruff said. Some will be foreclosed, while buyers might be found for others, he said.

For example, other firms, including Connecticut-based Spinnaker Real Estate Partners, assumed ownership of the One City Centre office building after Pyramid missed loan payments. One City Centre was to have been part of Mercantile Exchange, Pyramid’s six-block, mixed-use project that also encompassed the closed St. Louis Centre mall and the empty Dillard’s building. Spinnaker and others have been working to get part of that project under way.

Woodruff said the biggest accomplishment has been to get Pyramid’s "operating properties" — mainly its successful residential projects — into new hands.

"All the operating units have been distributed to other owners," he said.

"Luckily, it didn’t impact the tenants at all. The more difficult stuff is the commercially oriented developments, primarily in the downtown corridor."

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