The federal government spent $6.5 million to move and spruce up the historic Odd Fellows Hall building in downtown Salt Lake City.

At an auction Wednesday, it couldn’t find a buyer willing to pay even the minimum bid of $600,000.

Only one person — Utah restaurateur John Williams — placed an offer, for $365,000 .

“In an ideal situation, the bidding goes up” from the minimum, William Rollings, a realty specialist with the U.S. General Services Administration, said dryly. “Unfortunately, in this case, it went down from there.”

Williams owns the adjacent New York Hotel building, which was built in 1906. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and houses two restaurants: The New Yorker and Market Street Grill and Oyster Bar. He said he is interested in buying the Odd Fellows Hall as an investment because of its proximity. The restaurants are owned by Gastronomy Inc., of which Williams is a partner.

Though he made a bid, Williams said he’s not willing to pay a premium for the building, which was built in 1891 and is on the state historic register.

“With what it’s going to take to refurbish the building, what I offered is more than a fair price,” he said, adding that he was surprised to be the only bidder on the structure, named years ago for the Odd Fellows service organization.

Commercial real estate brokers familiar with the downtown area say determining a fair value for the property is difficult.

Similar buildings in good shape on about the same amount of land— 0.4 acre — have sold for $3 million or more; a similar-sized parcel of vacant land could fetch $700,000.

But the Odd Fellows Hall is in poor shape, and any buyer would be prohibited from tearing it down because of its historic status. The building is empty, has no fire safety systems, no elevators and does not meet seismic codes. A buyer would have to invest millions to rehab it.

Over the past decades, Williams and his business partners have successfully rehabbed several historic buildings, including the Salt Lake Hardware building and Ford Motor Building.

Even though Williams’ bid did not meet the government’s minimum, it will be reviewed and get some sort of response within 30 days, said Rollings, whose agency is an arm of the federal government that, among other duties, disposes of unneeded real estate assets.

The auction is the latest twist in the strange tale of the 119-year-old three-story office building that sits on the north side of Market Street between Main and West Temple.

The 25,000-square-foot building, which weighs 5 million pounds, was moved to its present location from across the street last year to make room for a new federal courthouse just west of the Frank E. Moss U.S. Courthouse at 350 S. Main St. After a new courthouse is built, the Moss Courthouse will be home only to bankruptcy judges, the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the U.S. Trustee.

Pressure from historic preservationists convinced government officials to move the Odd Fellows building rather than demolish it. Things did not go smoothly, with delays caused by bad weather, cracks in the structure and a dispute between a contractor and subcontractor.

Months of work went into preparing the structure for its short, complicated trek.