Want a Room with a View? – Downtown developer to turn three floors of its building into luxury apartments facing Firefighters Memorial Park – The Post Standard - May 31, 2008: B-6
By Rick Moriarty
Staff Writer
A long-vacant office building at the southwest corner of Townsend and East Genesee streets will be demolished soon to clear the way for the construction of six luxury apartments at the former Syracuse Boys Club next door.
S & W Redevelopment of North America, LLC, a company that specializes in cleaning up and redeveloping polluted properties, plans to put apartments in three floors of its six-story headquarters at the former Boys Club, 430 E. Genesee St.
The two- and three-bedroom apartments will range from 1,300 square feet to 1,800 square feet and will front East Genesee Street, overlooking Fayette Firefighters Memorial Park. Monthly rents will range from about $1,950 to $2,700.
Robert Petrovich, executive vice president of S & W, said the company bought the vacant office building at 444 E. Genesee St., which is between S & W’s headquarters and Townsend Street, from the city in March 2007 for $95,000. The building has been bacant for at least 12 years and was taken by the city for back taxes, he said.
S & W, which moved to Syracuse from Cazenovia in 2001, plans to tear down the vacant building and use the space for parking for the apartment and commercial tenants of its building.
The entire project will cost about $2.3 million, Petrovich said.
Elevators will open directly into the apartments. Petrovich said the company is targeting professionals looking for “urban living with a lawn” – the lawn being Fayette park.
He said financing is close to being completed for the project. Asbestos removal and demolition of the vacant office building will take place this fall, and construction of the apartments will take about six months, he said.
The apartments will be built in the second, third and fourth floors. The other floors will continue to be used for offices, including S & W’s.
The project is part of a trend in which vacant or underutilized downtown commercial space is being converted into luxury apartments. “We’ve been monitoring what’s going on downtown, seeing what other people are doing.” Petrovich said.
The vacant office building’s lack of any appealing architectural features drew the attention of Syracuse University last year when it began looking for downtown building that it could project art and videos onto at night.
University students used the building to test the art-projection technology. During the test, about 150 people who were downtown for the citywide visual arts gallery showcase stopped by Fayette Park to watch.
“The building provided a great screen, a surface, to project on,” said Eric Persons, director of community engagement and economic development for the university.
Even though the building is going to be demolished, SU’s interest in the location as an art-projection site isn’t waning. Persons said the university would like to project art onto the former Boys Club building.
“It’s such a great gateway into downtown, and you have a park that’s underutilized at night,” he said.
Tenants would not have to worry about artwork and videos shining in their windows. The projection systems can be programmed to “block out” the building’s windows that the art appears only on its walls, Persons said.