"Building Yonkers By Building Business Relationships"
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"Building Yonkers By Building Business Relationships" |
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New plans for historic hall The managing owner of a restored historic building in downtown Yonkers seeks a tenant to revive with a mix of fine dining and music a grand ballroom recently vacated by a private caterer who said the surrounding neighborhood drove away business. Shelley Weintraub, vice president for real estate at Greyston Foundation, the managing co-owner of Philipsburgh Hall at 2 Hudson St., said Greyston officials have talked to Yonkers restaurateurs about a “collaboration” that would allow the hall’s 5,800-square-foot Roosevelt Ballroom to be managed by a private restaurant operator who would share its use with others. “Certainly a catering hall is the best use,” she said. The ballroom, whose sound qualities were recently tested by an acoustical engineer, could be a venue too for live musical performances, said Jonathan Greengrass, Greyston vice president for development. “This needs to be expanded conceptually beyond a catering facility. It’s an extraordinary space for a restaurant,” he said. The ballroom needs “another Peter Kelly to create something exciting,” he said, referring to the owner/chef who last year opened X2O Xaviar’s on the Hudson at the Yonkers City Pier. “We’re interested in the best possible tenant for the space,” Greengrass said. “We’re flexible to negotiation.” Hall’s history Built in 1904 in the beaux-arts style, the five-story, classically porticoed Philipsburgh Hall has had several lives and functions. It opened as an office and apartment building. At one time it housed a restaurant where women wore ball gowns before passing through mahogany doors to the skylit, gold leaf-trimmed ballroom for dances and concerts. The presidents Roosevelt, Theodore and Franklin D., appeared at events there during visits to Yonkers, which inspired the ornately carved, echoing two-story space’s later renaming as the Roosevelt Ballroom, and leading actors such as Clara Bow and Helen Hayes performed on its stage. It even had an incarnation as a bingo parlor, according to Weintraub. Most recently it has been the awe-inducing setting for fundraising dinners, Yonkers Business Week luncheons, bat mitzvah and bar mitzvah parties and wedding receptions at which newlyweds made use of a bridal suite off the ballroom balcony. The once-thriving civic center was a deteriorated single-room occupancy welfare hotel when fire struck and the building was condemned in 1997. The hall, Weintraub said there last week, “was a burned-out shell” when its near neighbor on Getty Square, St. John’s Episcopal Church, bought it for a reported $1.1 million and proposed to restore it as an artists’ colony and cultural attraction that would help revive a poverty-stricken neighborhood. The church and Greyston Foundation formed a partnership and, with the city’s financial aid, embarked on an approximately $8 million restoration. In late 2001, the building reopened as the Philipsburgh Performing Arts Center with 28 affordable studio apartments upstairs, 22 of which were to be reserved for artists, musicians and performing arts professionals. Those residents could use the ballroom for rehearsals and jam sessions when not in public use as well as augment their incomes with work for the performing arts center and the private caterer that equally shared use of the 5,800-square-foot ballroom, Weintraub said. Though the studio apartments are fully occupied, most of the artists who arrived in a buzz of publicity in early 2002 have left Yonkers, Weintraub said, disillusioned by the lack of urban amenities in their downtown neighborhood and the slow pace of the heralded redevelopment that in part lured them there. She said they probably have migrated back to New York City. Though the city has granted Greyston a waiver to rent the affordable-housing units to non-artists, she said Greyston intends “sooner rather than later” to again maximize their use as an artists’ colony. 'Great reviews’ but
… The performing arts center enterprise was short-lived and closed a few years ago. With its departure, the ballroom’s other tenant, Encore Caterers, assumed full use of the leased space, which also included a 1,260-square-foot kitchen and booking office. (The Yonkers Downtown/Waterfront Business Improvement District leases two other streetfront offices in the building.) The catering business was a partnership of chef Ronald J. Stytzer, president of Antun’s of Westchester, the Elmsford catering facility, and John Fellin, owner of Bruno’s on the Boulevard, a catering facility in Jackson Heights, Queens. At the end of June, Encore Caterers vacated the premises, emptying the ballroom of tables and seating and the kitchen of equipment. “They did what they had to do,” Weintraub said. “We left,” Stytzer said last week from his Elmsford business. “It wasn’t doing well. The area didn’t change enough. “There was supposed to be a lot of things that were supposed to be done over a period of years. “We were promised a lot of things … and nothing happened.” Stytzer said the caterers’ customers from far more affluent Westchester County communities were intimidated by the southwest Yonkers neighborhood. He especially noted his business’s uneasy coexistence with The Sharing Community Inc. center, a nonprofit organization that provides a broad range of services for the city’s poor, jobless and ailing residents and operates a homeless shelter, soup kitchen and drop-in center for HIV/AIDS patients directly across Hudson Street from Philipsburgh Hall on the campus of St. John’s Episcopal Church. Some who made appointments to book an event “never stopped” after driving to the downtown location, Stytzer said. Arriving for events there, “People are nervous. They’re scared.” But once inside Philipsburgh Hall, “The room was great,” Stytzer said. “They loved it. We had great reviews on every event we did down there. If we were in a different location, we’d be sold out.” “Phil Amicone was wonderful to us,” the caterer said of the Yonkers mayor. “Everybody else, we were just disappointed. You needed the support of the people of Yonkers and you didn’t get the support” with ballroom event bookings. “You got some of the support but not enough.” “How long can you wait?” Stytzer said. “How long can you go in there and not make any money? We waited a long time.” Community issues “It’s a downtown, so there are challenges” for business owners, said Steve Sansone, executive director of the city’s Downtown/Waterfront Business Improvement District. “Nevertheless, the ballroom is so magnificent that it far surpasses any issues that might come with the surrounding neighborhood.” Philipsburgh Hall, which Sansone likened to “a mini-Playland,” is a “cornerstone” of the downtown’s resurgence, he said. “There are some issues relating to the shelter,” Sansone said of The Sharing Community center. “The work they do is good. It’s needed. The question is whether the location is best for the shelter and the business people.” David Booker, acting executive director of The Sharing Community, said the organization had considered moving its daytime outreach program for the homeless from Hudson Street to Ashburton Avenue but could not come up with funding for renovations. “We don’t have any concrete plans to move the entire agency,” he said. “It would be a complicated process. Frankly, I think the center’s beneficial to the neighborhood.” Booker noted The Sharing Community occupied Philipsburgh Hall years before the building was renovated. And some of its homeless clients were employed by the former catering tenant there. “For Yonkers and for any city trying to redevelop, there’s going to be some conflict there,” Booker said. A community benefits agreement negotiated between developers and community groups could address the needs of neighborhood residents. “Chasing people from Yonkers to Mount Vernon or New Rochelle doesn’t work,” he said. |
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