A historic Allentown property that used to house a popular restaurant and where Mark Twain lived early last century is on the market again, as its owner tries to unload a building that hasn’t seen a tenant in over a year.

Owner Anthony Trusso has listed the former Cloister Restaurant location at 468 Delaware Ave. for sale for $500,000. The 9,497-square-foot building, at the northeast corner of Delaware Avenue and Virginia Street, is being marketed by Hastings Cohn Real Estate as a retail store, office or restaurant.

The brokerage says it’s considered Class A space, and is also in an Empire Zone. And it has off-street parking for about 20 cars.

“It’s an excellent location,” said Cory Haqq, sales agent with Hastings Cohn. “It’s prime real estate in our opinion. It could fit several different types of businesses.”

Haqq said it’s been listed for a couple of weeks, and he’s already had “several interested prospects” look at the property, though no one has made an offer.

“We are showing the property actively as we speak,” he said. “I would assume something would happen in a relatively short period of time if something is going to happen.”

“It’s a great space,” Trusso said. “It’s a fantastic corner. It’s high visibility. It’s got a light. You couldn’t ask for a better location.”

The single-story building, which features both stained-glass and green house windows, as well as a courtyard, was constructed on the foundations of the former home where Mark Twain lived from 1870 to 1871. That original home was destroyed by fire in 1963, but the carriage house remains intact on the back quarter of the property. It’s now part of the current building, but retains “some historical designation,” so it can’t be torn down, Haqq said. “That does present some challenges,” he admitted. “But if someone’s interested in cultivating something historical, it’s an obvious fit for that party.”

More recently, the current building used to be home to Cloister, one of the most popular fine-dining restaurants in the city when it was open from 1964 through 1989, under the DiLapo family. Later, it housed the offices of Business First and the Buffalo Law Journal, until the two publications moved to the Lafayette Square Building downtown.

The three-quarter-acre site was vacant from 2001 until it was purchased in 2006 for $476,000 by Trusso, a real estate investor who expected a Clarence daycare center to occupy the site. Country Park Child Care had said it would invest about $300,000 to retrofit the building to handle up to 100 children. But the daycare never got a grant it was counting on, so it backed out. A month-to-month tenant has occupied the space since then, but no main tenant for a long period of time. A couple of potential buyers had made offers to purchase it in the past, but Trusso wasn’t willing to sell at the time.

Now, however, he said he’s concluded that the building’s unique characteristics and the cost of modifying it to fit a short-term tenant make it more ideal as an owner-occupied building than a lease.

“It just wasn’t feasible to do it for a tenant,” he said. “It’s really come down to the investment a tenant would make in the space.”