St. John”™s Riverside Hospital could be the first occupant in 40 years at the former Boyce Thompson Institute in Yonkers, where Simone Development Cos. recently was joined by city officials for a ceremonial groundbreaking at the start of a $35 million, 20-month commercial redevelopment project.
Developer Joseph Simone, president of Bronx-based Simone Development, announced at the ceremony that an institutional neighbor in northwest Yonkers, St. John”™s Riverside, will lease for medical offices an entire 15,000-square-foot glass building to be built on the long-vacant industrial property at 1086 N. Broadway.
The renamed Boyce Thompson Center will include a restored two-story main building on the 6.5-acre site that will be leased for business and medical offices, retail stores, banking and two restaurants. A new 18,000-square-foot building will be added at the south end of the main building, connected by a glass structure evoking the razed rows of greenhouses once used for plant research on the site.
Yonkers Mayor Mike Spano called the architecturally distinctive property “a case study in adaptive reuse, demonstrating that with the right developer we can preserve an old building and make it viable in the new economy.”