November 15, 2009

In the Region | Westchester

The Use Changes; the Look Stays

By ELSA BRENNER

UNTIL two years ago, the boarded-up Ossining National Bank on Main Street served as a nagging reminder that a once-thriving business district was sliding downhill. The last bank tenant vacated the building, a three-story Renaissance Revival-style structure, in 1966, and it had been vacant ever since.

Today, light shines through its tall windows again, the cracked tile roof has been repaired and the stone and terra-cotta exterior has been refurbished.

Thanks to a $4.6 million renovation, what was once the workplace of tellers and loan officers is being recycled into street-floor commercial space with 12 income-restricted condominiums above.

“The people of Ossining have been waiting forever for this building to come back,” said William R. Hanauer, the village’s mayor. “It’s emblematic of a turnaround.”

The bank, built in 1873, sits in a three-block area with about 35 other old retail buildings; together they make up a National Historic District. To stimulate more activity at the site, the village recently altered its zoning laws to allow building owners to rent space over their shops to residential tenants.

But though historic renovations help revitalize downtowns and instill optimism in residents and officials, they can be challenging to undertake. Developers’ experiences on the Ossining project, as well as one in Yonkers involving six late-19th-century brick-and-limestone buildings, give a sense of how difficult it can be to restore an antiquated structure for purposes of affordable housing in Westchester.

The developer of the Ossining bank, John Saraceno of Trinity Associates in Elmsford, described the process as frustrating and not highly remunerative — “one of the smaller but more difficult jobs” that the firm had ever undertaken.

“It would have been better in certain ways to have taken the building down and started from scratch,” said Mr. Saraceno, whose firm in 2000 converted an abandoned 1919 high school in Peekskill into a 120-unit independent living community.

The bank had suffered from neglect for years, under a series of owners. It had been gutted, but renovations were never followed through, said Joanne Tall, the chairwoman of the village’s historic review commission.

Ms. Tall said the commission “made certain that no character-defining features on the building were lost.” The panel “doesn’t dictate a building’s use,” she explained. “That’s for zoning ordinances to do.”

But the panel did have the right, for instance, to require that the terra-cotta cornice with medallions and the Spanish tiled roof be restored rather than replaced with something new.

For Mr. Saraceno, that meant a countrywide search for exact matches for the roof tile, much of which was either cracked or missing. Replacements were eventually tracked down in the Virginia warehouse of a company that specializes in antique roof materials, he said.

In Yonkers, the Greyston Foundation, a community development group that has reclaimed a number of old retail buildings for housing, is now embarking upon a six-building project covering about 32,000 square feet. The foundation had planned to raze the buildings except for the facades.

“It would have been cheaper and more efficient to start anew,” said Steven Brown, Greyston’s president. “We didn’t think it was worth saving, but citizens pressed to have it landmarked, and it was designated last year, so it was back to the drawing board.”

The project, which calls for 93 income-restricted living units with retailing on the first floor, is expected to cost $40 million.

Such conversions, which preserve historic beauty but involve multiple sources of financing and oversight by local boards, “are inherently very challenging because you’re trying to serve so many masters and competing interests,” Mr. Brown said.

In Ossining, the 21,000-square-foot bank renovation, which began 18 months ago and is nearly finished, is being paid for in part with $1.2 million from Westchester County, $480,000 from the New York State Affordable Housing Corporation, a traditional $2.6 million mortgage and the firm’s own equity.

The seven one-bedroom units will sell to people earning less than 80 percent of the county’s median income. For a one-person household, that means an income of less than $59,000 a year; for two people, the annual income must be under $67,400, said Rose Noonan, the executive director of the nonprofit Housing Action Council in Tarrytown.

The five two-bedroom units are priced at $214,000 to $221,000; the seven one-bedroom condos will sell for $179,000 to $198,000.

“We’re only talking about 12 units,” Ms. Noonan said, “but they are an important 12, because there hasn’t been any affordable homeownership available in the village of Ossining until now. It’s an opportunity for singles and couples, or a single parent with a child.”