The Rev. Ivory Crittendon couldn’t watch but a few seconds.

The iron pincher of a track hoe drew a crowd from Tacoma’s Hilltop neighborhood Tuesday morning as it munched through Ivory’s Auto Rebuild.

“I tell you,” Crittendon said, “I had some sad moments watching it. But now it’s time to let something great take place.”

That “something great” involves tearing down three commercial buildings and a house to make room for a five-story, 80-unit apartment complex built over the top of street-level retail space.

For this $8 million project, Crittendon and his son, Eric, an agent for John L. Scott Real Estate, have partnered with Tacoma’s Gintz Group to continue their transformative work on the Hilltop.

Ivory founded Brotherhood Church of God and built a school, Christian Brotherhood Academy, for preschoolers through second-graders, directly across the street from the old auto shop he bought in 1974.

The Gintz Group, meanwhile, hit the market in April with the first 17 condominiums converted from the 87-unit, 1967-vintage Vista Rainier Apartments. That project – rechristened as 27th Street Station – sits just four blocks from Crittendon’s corner.

“We get along real good,” Crittendon said. “There’s an understanding. We take a lot of counseling from each other.”

It works because Crittendon had the vision for the block, and the Gintz Group has the development and construction management background to make it happen.

The project got a cleanup grant from the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department to remove three underground tanks from the site’s life as a gas station in the 1930s and 1940s. The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development has committed to most of the financing. Construction, however, won’t start at least until spring, when the Tacoma City Council should grant a planned rezone request for a six-story building with mostly small studio and one-bedroom apartments.

But for Crittendon, all that amounts to the achievement of a vision to bring prosperity to the Hilltop.

“I want to thank God for Tacoma being Tacoma. … I know light will shine in the darkness. Good things are taking place,” he said.

Yes, they are. But when this former crime reporter for The News Tribune pointed out that on 23rd and K, L and M streets often meant bad things over the years and contributed to the notorious reputation of the Hilltop, Crittendon acknowledged so only briefly.

“We stopped a lot of fights along there. I’ve seen men get beat up and ladies get beat up. Shootings,” he said.

He bought a house in the same block as his body shop just to kick out the drug dealers and fencing operation.

“That’s my calling,” he said, “to make the world better, to make the community better. That’s what I live for. It’s a good journey.”

And what made the journey possible? Ivory’s Auto Rebuild. The income paid the bills and raised the investment capital to acquire property for a church and a school and, now, a commercial and residential project that can change the neighborhood.

Out of that shop, Crittendon also ran a training program for troubled young men, still in high school, so they could earn enough shop credits to graduate.

Eric Crittendon, who ran the body and fender shop after his father retired, closed it in 1999, partly because of a raft of new environmental laws that would have required investments in oil-and-water separators and new auto- painting air systems.

“I have mixed feelings,” Eric Crittendon said while watching the demolition with his brother, Daniel. “Dad made us work in there with him. I think I was 9 when I started. … But it’s a good thing. The plan is to bring the neighborhood back.”

As his father says, “God just wanted me to stay on the vision, and it came to be.”

Dan Voelpel: 253-597-8785

dan.voelpel@thenewstribune.com">dan.voelpel@thenewstribune.com