A period of grand ambition and largely unfulfilled achievement in the redevelopment of downtown Yonkers could come to a close this year with city officials scrapping their 4-year-old agreement with a now-defunct master developer and freeing one remaining partner in that private development team to move ahead with an estimated $100 million apartment project on the reviving downtown Yonkers waterfront.
Mayor Mike Spano told the Business Journal that he was about to meet with City Council members to seek their support for a plan to separate the redevelopment of Chicken Island near Getty Square from residential development on the Hudson River at Palisades Point. Both projects were included in the complex land disposition agreement that city officials reached in 2009 with Struever Fidelco Cappelli L.L.C., chosen in 2006 as the city”™s master developer for the downtown and waterfront transformation pushed by former Mayor Philip Amicone. SFC proposed several phased projects, from Nepperhan Avenue north to Alexander Street, whose total cost initially was estimated at $1.6 billion.
At Chicken Island, the site of a sprawling and underused municipal parking lot, SFC”™s River Park Center was to be the centerpiece and first phase of downtown redevelopment. But the planned mixed-use project, which initially included high-rise residential towers, a cinema complex, major retail stores, commercial office space and a sports stadium that planners hoped would attract a minor league baseball team to Yonkers, never progressed as credit markets froze in 2008 and the economic downturn sidelined developers across the country.
In Yonkers, Baltimore-based Struever Bros. Eccles & Rouse dropped out of the SFC partnership in 2009, when developer Louis R. Cappelli, head of Cappelli Enterprises Inc. in Valhalla, took over Struever”™s equity interest. But Cappelli, incurring heavy financial and property losses and mired in debt and lawsuits with former development partners in recent years, formally resigned from SFC last December.
That has left standing in Yonkers only the original SFC partner, Marc E. Berson, founding chairman of Fidelco Realty Group, a leading redeveloper of historic downtown Newark with headquarters in Millburn, N.J. Berson, who said he has invested more than $30 million in Yonkers since venturing there in 2005, last winter formed a new limited liability company in New York, SFC Yonkers L.L.C.
Despite a notice last January from Spano”™s office that SFC”™s agreement with the city at Palisades Point had expired, Berson at that time said he would work with the new City Hall administration to “get to the finish line” on construction of scaled-down projects at River Park Center and two other downtown sites and at Palisades Point.
Asked recently about that expiration notice and its resolution, Berson said, “There was a negotiation as the new administration and our team got to know each other. I would describe what we”™re doing as a real partnership with this city and this administration. We”™re both seeing eye to eye.”
“I think Marc Berson is a gem, I really do,” Spano told the Business Journal.
On Nov. 13, Spano and Berson were joined by City Council members at a ribbon-cutting ceremony for Fidelco”™s completed first phase of a Palisades Point walkway on previously inaccessible industrial land. A wooden boardwalk later will be laid over the 650-foot-long, 16-foot wide esplanade.
For Berson, the public project is a prelude to construction of an apartment development at Palisades Point on the city”™s so-called H & I parcels that he hopes to begin in 2014.
The developer said he is awaiting a determination on the number of parking spaces that Fidelco is required to provide residents of adjacent Scrimshaw House in the parking garage that Fidelco will build on the north end of the H&I site. Then his company will complete design plans for a low-rise development of rental apartments. Berson said he hopes to present a revised site plan to the Yonkers Planning Board for approval within 90 days.
The developer”™s new waterfront proposal could face less community opposition than SFC encountered several years ago. Berson said the project would include from 300 to 350 rental units in low-rise buildings of five to 10 stories. The SFC project called for 436 condo units in two 25-story towers. “We”™re going to have a less intensive use of the land,” he said.
“A for-sale, high-rise product is just not feasible today,” he said. “We”™re excited that it”™s kind of a new product at the moment” on a downtown waterfront dominated by the high-rise residential buildings of nearby Hudson Park, where the mayor said Collins Enterprises L.L.C. will break ground in a few months on its third and final apartment tower on the site north of City Pier.
Berson said he also wants to build a residential development on a 4.3-acre former industrial property on Alexander Street, known as the ATI site, which was to be a later project of SFC. “We believe with the successful development of the Collins property and H&I, the ATI site becomes the most developable waterfront site,” he said.
“It took a lot of unraveling,” Spano said of the complex city agreement with SFC that he inherited in a still stagnant economy. “There”™s really no how-to manual for this.”
“The administration is comfortable on a few agreements with Fidelco,” he said on the day before he met with the City Council on scrapping the SFC agreement. “It”™s going to get H&I off the ground pretty rapidly. These types of developments are contagious.”
Regarding Chicken Island, “It is our belief that we should separate that property and let that property stand on its own,” the mayor said. “We have a lot of interest from developers on that piece. You don”™t find a piece of property like that within the downtown area.”
With City Council support, Spano said he would like to see the city issue a new request for proposals from developers for what was to be SFC”™s River Park Center site by the start of 2014.
“We believe this is the right economy of scale with this project and this developer (Berson),” Spano said. “The other proposal was very aggressive and probably just too grand an idea.”
