The Venue at Bloomingdale Road is one step closer to being approved by the city of White Plains.
On March 19, the White Plains Planning Board unanimously recommended that the Common Council approve a site plan for a 50,000-square-foot retail and outdoor restaurant project in downtown White Plains at 120 Bloomingdale Road.
The project, which will cost up to $30 million, will feature high-end boutique retailers with the goal of offering brands not found at the Westchester Mall or Bloomingdales.
“We are working hard to find individual unique brands carried in Manhattan that have a real street sense,” said Joshua Caspi, principal at Caspi Development Co. in Purchase, one of the developers of the property.
A public hearing will be held on the project in May, and Caspi said they hope to be approved by the Common Council over the summer. White Plains Mayor Thomas Roach declined to comment on the project.
Once approved, Caspi expects construction to start in the first of quarter 2015, and the project will take about 18 months to complete.
The project is a partnership of Caspi Development and Faros Properties, the latter based in New York City and Boston. The developers paid $10.5 million for the four-story, approximately 146,000-square-foot office building, the former headquarters of The Nestle Co.
Austin Corporate Properties Inc. in Rye Brook represented the buyers in the deal that closed last October.
Caspi said the property had been appraised at $33 million. The office building is currently 70 percent occupied. Major tenants in the building include the state Department of Labor, Byram Healthcare, Oxman Tulis Kirkpatrick Whyatt & Geiger L.L.P. and Keller Williams Realty White Plains.
Core Plus Properties L.L.C., of Stamford, Conn., in 2005 paid $27.3 million for the property. White Plains city officials in 2008 approved the Stamford developer”™s plans for The Venue, a 42,000-square-foot complex of boutique retail stores and restaurants on the site.
Core Plus Properties owed about $20.4 million on the property, county records indicate, when it was deeded in 2010 to J.E. Robert Co. Inc., of Dallas, a special servicer of commercial mortgage-backed security loans. The Texas company allowed city approvals for the development project to expire last year.
The Caspi Development and Faros Properties partnership, 120 Bloomingdale Road L.L.C., hired Gallin Beeler Design Studio in Tarrytown to design a new facade for the 1950s-era building along with parking lot improvements and some interior changes, and hired Arrowstreet Inc., of Boston, as architects.
“We hope to create a quality street presence that ties in all of the retail on Bloomingdale Road,” Caspi said. “We want it to be a very inviting proposition.”
The partnership took out a $6.25 million mortgage with New York Community Bank.
