LOCKPORT — Every so often, government gets involved in a development program that actually pays off.
Harrison Place in Lockport seems to be such an effort.
Six years after the city foreclosed on the former auto parts plant and gave serious thought to demolishing it, 30 small businesses are operating there, employing nearly 90 people.
The sprawling four-building complex at Walnut and Washburn streets, originally built in 1914 as the home of Harrison Radiator Co., covers about 461,000 square feet.
Greater Lockport Development Corp., the city’s development agency, ended up holding the bag in 2006, when the former owner, Frank Spezio of Rochester, defaulted on about $1 million in loans from the agency.
Spezio called the plant Commerce Square and tried a business plan similar to the one the city has used.
But while Spezio’s vision of small offices and manufacturers didn’t pay off, the one implemented by the city seems to be on its way to success.
“It’s been a struggle, but the [agency] board made a tough decision, and it paid off,” Mayor Michael
W. Tucker said. “It’s not a moneymaker,
but it’s not a money pit, either.”
The complex is owned by 210 Walnut LLC, an officially private entity, albeit one headed by the mayor and governed by the development corporation board.
In September 2007, the board hired B. Thomas Mancuso of Batavia and his Mancuso Business Development Group to manage the property and try to recruit tenants.
The following year, Mancuso hired a veteran of the local real estate scene, former Town of Lockport Assessor Kevin M. Van Dusen, as his site coordinator.
Van Dusen had just retired from town government and decided he didn’t like sitting around.
“There’s too much work left in me,” he said. “The thought of reusing a building like this and bringing it back to life is a challenge I couldn’t pass up.”
One of the key factors was repairing the woes of decades of neglect, such as a leaky roof and a broken elevator.
With help from State Sen. George
D. Maziarz, R-Newfane, the city began
to score grants from state agencies to revitalize what Mancuso insisted on renaming Harrison Place, because, as he told the development agency’s board in 2007, “ ‘Commerce Square’ just has bad karma.”
The biggest grant was $1.5 million from the Restore New York program. The city also received $250,000 from the Dormitory Authority and a like amount from the Office of Community Renewal, which required the development agency to match it with $75,000 of its own.
The eventual result was a roof that doesn’t leak and the capacity to partition suites for businesses to rent at a price anyone would consider dirt cheap.
The tab ranges from $1.80 per square foot for storage to $6 a square foot for office space in Building 1A along the Washburn Street side.
By contrast, much fancier office space in Lockport goes for about $20 a square foot.
“It goes with the concept Tom [Mancuso] has about being an incubator,” Van Dusen said.
Little of what goes on in Harrison Place is fancy or cutting-edge. But as Mancuso said, “It’s not that we don’t like the high-tech stuff, but while we’re waiting for that, we could be dying.”
Once propped by emergency infusions of cash from the development agency, Harrison Place ran in the black in May.
Van Dusen said the huge building still has plenty of “cold storage” space available, and he isn’t kidding. “Cold” means unheated, but the storage space is being used by everyone from the Lockport City School District, which has 18,000 square feet, to Timkey Limousine Co.
At first, such storage was almost the only source of income.
“Early on, it was storage, no jobs. Then it was manufacturing. Now it’s
manufacturing with office,” Mancuso said.
Van Dusen noted that the numerous concrete pillars that support the roof, spaced 18 feet apart, made natural divisions for business suites. Soon, walls began to connect the columns.
“With the grant money that’s come in, Kevin has done a great job being creative in developing space,” said R. Charles Bell, the city’s director of planning and development.
The base unit at Harrison Place thus is 18 by 18 feet.
“We’re using parts of all four buildings,” Mancuso said. About 100,000 square feet are spoken for, including the entire first floor of Building 2, which is 61,000 square feet.
“We’ve been growing the hallway system, which is opening up parts of the building,” Mancuso said.
Although Van Dusen ackowledged that the pillars “impede what you can do a little bit,” other characteristics of the huge old factory are helpful.
For instance, there is a loading ramp that begins at street level and leads into the heart of the building — a godsend for tenants such as Louis J. Faery, whose Faery Auctions just signed a new five-year lease on his 3,500 square feet.
Faery, who retired as a Niagara County sheriff’s investigator in 2003, turned to selling real estate and acting as an auctioneer at estate sales.
“On-site [auctions] were falling off. Running around selling real estate, I ran into a lot of small lots,” Faery said.
In January 2010, he started out by renting storage space for his consignments, and in May 2011, Faery began holding auctions on the first and third Mondays of each month in what was once the shipping and receiving department of the plant.
“He’s had as many as 160 people in here with [bidding] numbers,” Van Dusen said.
“We do a lot of household and estate sales and business liquidations, from tractors to teacups,” Faery said.
And he has been able to drive cars, lawn tractors and other vehicles in and out of the plant easily, thanks to the ground-level loading ramp, which also allows Faery and other tenants to load and unload goods out of the weather.
Manufacturing has taken root in Harrison Place, too. One of the success stories is Ideal Innovations, a contract parts manufacturer. Mancuso said its workforce has grown from five to nine in the last 18 months.
“It’s pretty exiting to see them make things and ship them out,” Van Dusen said. “UPS and FedEx are here three or four times a day.”
“The office uses are much more job-dense,” Mancuso said.
One of the success stories on that side of the business scene is United Merchant Asset Recovery, a collection agency that’s planning to triple its office space and add jobs.
Mancuso said that before summer is out, he expects work to begin on a spiffy glassed-in entrance off Washburn Street, leading to the office tenants.
“To energize the building, to put that entrance in will make all the difference in the world,” he said.
Another successful business in the complex is Mantelli Trailer Sales. Its showroom is on South Transit Road, but at Harrison Place is where you’ll find its trailer accessory shipping headquarters.
Tucked away on the third floor is Rissa Productions, headed by Buc Williams, once locally renowned as the country singer at the Burt Hotel.
Now, Williams has gone Hollywood and even Bollywood. He has an audio and video production studio, which he used to dub an Indian-made movie called “Fountain of Love” into English.
He also produces a children’s video series called “Forever Friends,” which stars Chris Burke, the actor with Down syndrome who was featured in the television series “Life Goes On.”
He said he met Burke at what then was HSBC Arena, where Williams was the sound technician for one of the Skating Association of the Blind and Handicapped ice shows in which Burke was the guest star.
“ ‘Forever Friends,’” Williams said, “is aimed at young kids ages 3 to 7. It’s aimed at inclusion of kids with all different kinds of abilities. That’s a term they use instead of disabilities.”
So far, two of the planned 16 episodes have been completed. Burke and his business partners are planning to distribute them to teachers on DVD, although the shows can be seen for free online at www.foreverfriendsshow.org.
Down the hall is Kathy Michaels, a retired local science teacher who continues her dogged attempts to round up funding to open a Challenger Learning Center, aimed at exciting local schoolchildren about science by placing them in a space exploration setting.
She has $400,000 in state grants earmarked but needs to raise matching funds to shake the money loose.
“We’re talking to some people. We haven’t been to the biggest foundations yet,” she said.
From those realizing their dreams to those still fighting to accomplish them, Harrison Place has become one of Lockport’s centers for the types of small-business jobs that, as politicians constantly say, comprise most job creation.
Van Dusen recalled that four years ago, “People would laugh, ‘They’re going to tear that down, aren’t they?’ . . . It’s great to prove them wrong.”
