The plan to build a movie and TV production complex on an approximately 28-acre parcel at 501 Hawthorne Ave., in Yonkers that had been owned by Rising Ground/Leake and Watts has been scaled back. Some neighbors expressed their opposition to the proposal.
National Resources’ i.Park Riverdale LLC had purchased the approximately 28-acre Hawthorne Avenue property from Rising Ground Inc., in December of 2022 for $52.6 million. National Resources, based in Greenwich, has been instrumental in creating with Great Point Studios the Lionsgate and Mediapro movie and TV production facilities in Yonkers.
In an initial phase of development at the Rising Ground site, the existing Biondi School Building and Ames School Building on the property was refurbished to create the Robert Halmi Sr. Academy for Film & Television. The public middle and high school operated by the Yonkers Board of Education was opened with a formal ribbon-cutting last Sept. 25. Robert Halmi Sr. was a renowned movie and TV producer and the father of Great Point’s Robert Halmi Jr.
Originally proposed for the site was a studio complex that had five soundstages. The proposal called for four 20,000-square-feet stages and one 10,000-square-feet stage. Also planned was 60,000 square feet of carpentry and set-building shop space along with office space, associated truck parking and an approximately 250-space parking garage.
According to revised plans now being reviewed by the Yonkers Planning Board, the proposed film studio complex has been reduced to three sound stages, two at 20,000 square feet and one at 10,000 square feet. The scenic construction space would be 15,090 square feet and a second floor warehouse would be 16,443 square feet. The garage has been eliminated and 170 at-grade parking spaces are proposed in two lots, one for staff and one for visitors. The setback from the adjacent residential street Valentine Lane is proposed to be increased with additional landscaping, including 125 new trees, added.
Lynn Ward, co-founder of National Resources, said, “This is part of this ‘Hollywood on the Hudson’ concept that has been generating many impacts in Yonkers, jobs specifically. You notice that we started with something, we shrunk it, and now we gave it what I call the Wegovy (weight loss drug) treatment. It lost 30% of its mass, its footprint and everything else.”
Ward said that they looked for things they could do to make the proposed new building better blend in with the buildings that already are on the site. She said color was the element that most stood out and the materials proposed to be used for the exterior of the new building were selected to be in harmony with the colors of materials used in the construction of the existing buildings.
Ward said that so far the studios already built and operating in Yonkers have brought 2,278 new jobs to the city.
“I think that speaks to economic feasibility,” Ward said. “There are 1,000 indirectly created jobs, which is spinoff business to the small restaurants, the bakeries, the coffee shops, the dry cleaners, all those types of businesses.”
Ward said that the movie and TV studios that National Resources has helped bring to Yonkers are the face of the new Yonkers.
“I realize change is hard,” Ward said. “But this is, in fact, the economic vitality that is keeping the city going. It’s been open to new ideas. Those new ideas have regenerated and regenerated and made for the success that Yonkers is today.”
During a public hearing, Eileen O’Connor, a Valentine Lane resident who serves on the board of a neighborhood association, said that the neighbors specifically want to talk with National Resources about moving the proposed studio building to a different spot on the property so it would not be visible from Valentine Lane. She said that neighbors believe a group of cottages on the site could be demolished, the studio building constructed there and the section currently designated for the studio building could remain as open space.
