Termini seeks to redevelop long-vacant AM&A’s store
Developer says project will be a ‘heavy lift’
Downtown developer Rocco Termini plans to spend $80 million to $100 million on redeveloping the former AM&A department store downtown, possibly in as little as a year, but said he’ll need government help to do it.
Termini, who has started converting three former AM&A warehouse buildings into apartments and office space, told the directors of Buffalo Place Wednesday that he has begun discussions with various planners and designers to help on the project.
He stressed to Buffalo Place directors that “it’s not going to happen next week or next month,” but it could be next year. “It’s do-able and it needs to be done,” he said.
As part of his plan, he applied for and obtained from the State Historic Preservation Office a designation of the AM&A buildings as a historic district. That prevents the historic portions from being torn down, while making the entire project eligible for historic tax credits.
He said the AM&A’s project, the Statler Towers and the 500 block of Main Street should be priorities for redevelopment efforts downtown. But he acknowledged the challenge posed by the AM&A’s store, which has been the biggest hurdle in any redevelopment effort for the long vacant but highly visible cluster of buildings.
“That is a heavy lift,” he said. “We’re going to need a lot of help from government agencies, but it needs to be done.”
Termini, through his Signature Development Buffalo LLC firm, started work a month ago on his $11 million effort to turn three of the four former AM&A warehouse buildings at 369 Washington Street into 65,000 square feet of residential and commercial space.
The five-story buildings were full of debris and asbestos, but workers have mostly taken out the trash in the last four weeks and are finishing up asbestos removal. Construction work will begin in one to two weeks, he said. The architect on the project is Carmina Wood Morris PC.
Termini is planning to convert the buildings into 48 apartments, a collections office and a surface parking lot. Plans call for 36 one-bedroom apartments and 12 with two bedrooms. The first floor will be 15,000 square feet of office space, which will be occupied by P&B Acquisitions, which owns the Philips & Burns debt collection agency.
The fourth building, a three-story addition on East Eagle Street built in 1965, will be torn down and converted into 26 parking spaces.
Termini said he hopes to open the project by next March or April, and to be fully occupied on the first day. Already, he said, there are 15 people on the waiting list for apartments.
“We don’t think there will be any problem filling the apartments,” he said. “There really is a demand in Buffalo for good apartments.”
The one-bedroom apartments will be priced at $795 a month, while the two-bedrooms will go for $995 a month.
“You can’t continue to produce all these apartments just at the top of the pyramid. There’s a great demand for apartments at the $795 range,” he said. “We need to expand our housing downtown.”
The cluster of AM&A buildings date back to 1886, when the J. N. Adam & Co. Department Store opened as a dry-goods store before expanding later into a broader department store. The buildings later became
the flagship store of Adam, Meldrum & Anderson Co., a family-owned chain of department stores based in Buffalo that was sold in 1994 to Bon- Ton Stores.
A year later, the department store closed, reopening for only a few months in 1998 as an upscale women’s department store and restaurant before closing again. It has been vacant since early 1999, and has become an eyesore downtown, deteriorating over the years and threatened with demolition.
Various plans emerged and the buildings were even acquired by out-of-town developer New Horizons Acquisitions LLC in September 2006 for $2.05 million, with the intention of converting them into apartments and ground-floor retail. But none of the concepts progressed until Termini bought the warehouses. He is now negotiating with New Horizons to buy the store as well.
Termini is already a veteran of converting vacant downtown spaces into loft apartments, having developed the IS Lofts, Ellicott Lofts, Ellicott Commons, Oak School, Webb Lofts and Oak Street Apartments.
Meanwhile, work continues on the city’s effort to return cars to Main Street. Work on the 700 block is on schedule for completion in early July. Lights are up, electrical power will be activated soon, sidewalks are already in place and workers will lay down the asphalt next. A revised environmental assessment report for the Theatre District portion has also been sent to federal regulators for review.
Also, officials said the city has applied for grants for $1.7 million, mostly for traffic signals, to support an eventual return to two-way traffic on Pearl Street.
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