Building renovations helping downtown’s vitality
Customers at Baxter”™s Pharmacy in downtown Peekskill pass beneath a three-story canopy of scaffolding and safety netting to enter a store where contractors work while prescriptions are filled. The construction work in progress is a common sight this year in a downtown that seems to defy the economic malaise that has stalled much private investment and redevelopment in the cities of Westchester County.
“If you go to any town or city and you see a lot of scaffold and construction, that means the town is booming,” said pharmacist Mohammed Amin, owner of Baxter”™s Pharmacy at 950 Main St. More than a decade ago Amin bought the 1850s-era brick building ”“ where a furniture store and undertaker once shared space and a storefront sign ”“ as a more central location for the business the Pakistani native has run in Peekskill since 1977.
“A lot of change, ups and downs,” Amin said of Peekskill over the last three decades. “When I bought this building, it was a big depression here. A lot of boarded-up buildings and for-sale signs. Now, a lot of construction. Business is booming.”
Development specialist credited as catalyst
While retail business in Peekskill did slow in the recession, said Amin, and mixed-use redevelopment on the city”™s waterfront has halted, the business owner credited the city”™s economic development specialist, Christopher Marra, as a catalyst for the current signs of business vitality. Since his arrival at City Hall in 2008, Marra has successfully pursued state grants that have helped keep area contractors busy and have aided downtown property owners as they convert derelict buildings and long-vacant spaces into artists”™ lofts and retail shops and restaurants.
The city earlier this year received a $200,000 grant from the New York Main Street program of the state Division of Housing and Community Renewal. The grant was used to leverage a total of nearly $700,000 in improvements to Amin”™s building and four others downtown. The rehabilitated properties include 13 commercial units and four apartments on Main and Division streets.
City officials recently announced an additional $500,000 grant through the state Main Street program that will be used for improvements to 27 eligible downtown properties. Peekskill was one of 38 communities across the state and the only Westchester community to receive a grant in the latest round of program funding.
Artists”™ lofts a key ingredient
Amin received $75,000 of the initial state grant for work on his building, where he is turning two long-abandoned upper floors into three artists”™ lofts, including a duplex that will rent for $1,800 a month. The floor-to-ceiling windows being installed in the lofts, under the watchful and occasionally disapproving eye of the city”™s historic preservation officials, alone will cost $20,000, he said. The project when completed later this month “will cost me around $400,000,” said Amin. “There was no electric, no plumbing upstairs.”
At 23 N. Division St., business owner Kenneth Laudon too stepped into the historic past when he purchased the four-story, 6,600-square-foot building in 1995. Laudon, a former professor at New York University”™s Stern School of Business, moved his 15-employee software company, Azimuth Multimedia, a publisher of e-books and interactive training materials, from his overcrowded Croton home into the downtown building.
“The third and fourth floors had not been used in 100 years,” he said. “They still had gas light fixtures in them.” Staircases had collapsed and “pigeons were flying around,” he recalled.
Laudon estimated he has invested $400,000 to $500,000 in the building, which he gutted to create three 1,200-square-foot artists”™ lofts and a 500-square-foot ground-floor gallery, currently leased by a New York City graphic design company, in addition to his company”™s storefront space. “It ended up being a good deal,” he said of his investment in the 1870s-era brick building. “The replacement value is well over $1 million.”
Laudon plans to apply for a share of the city”™s new Main Street grant to revive a three-story building he recently acquired at 13 Division St., next door to his business. The previous owner, Community Preservation Corp., failed to develop the dilapidated structure, he said. Laudon will renovate four upstairs apartments as artists”™ lofts and is negotiating a lease with an Irish-born developer who wants to open “an authentic Irish pub” on North Division Street, where a row of crowd-drawing restaurants and bars has developed in recent years.
Since Laudon”™s arrival 15 years ago, “The street is in better shape,” he said. “I think our investment helped secure what was a beautiful street. But it could have gone another way.”
Laudon said the city”™s 20-year-old effort to rezone and revive downtown Peekskill as an affordable place for artists to live and work has been amplified and enriched by a night-life scene that has grown around the emergence of the downtown Paramount Theater and Ford Piano buildings as centers for performing arts.
“The original vision of being a downtown Nyack of curio shops and artist lounging around selling art, that sort of evolved,” he said. “I think they discovered the highest-value uses of these properties are as entertainment and performance centers. The plan of just artists has segued into performing arts.”