Quoted from 192

I thought that the exemption had been approved?  Or am I misremembering that?

You might be right. It has been so long that I don't remember either.

Maybe it's our required suspension of disbelief.

Sometimes I think this stuff is deliberately kept quiet just so that we can't voice our opinions. And perhaps they will hope that we'll just forget about it until we see the bull dozers.

I wonder if the watermain break, which looked like it flooded part of the Capitol Plaza will spur the take down of the building.  Maybe the Town could condemn the building from the water damage.  Nahhh..that'd be too easy.

TU reports deal is dead

http://www.timesunion.com

Quoted Text

Walgreens drops Rotterdam move
After 14 businesses depart Capital Plaza, Illinois drug chain cancels expansion plan

By ALAN WECHSLER, Business writer
First published: Thursday, July 31, 2008

ROTTERDAM -- First the pizza place departed. Then the printing store left. The men's shop followed, as did the salon, the lunch spot and the chiropractic office.

     
By early 2008, 14 tenants had left the Capital Plaza, a 50-year-old shopping center at the busy corner of Curry Road and Altamont Avenue.

But it was all for naught. It seems plans for a Walgreens drug store -- the reason for this retail diaspora -- have been abandoned.

"Walgreens has no plans for a store in Rotterdam, N.Y.," wrote Carol Hively, a Walgreens spokeswoman, in response to a recent query on the status of the store. She did not respond to requests for more information.

The Deerfield, Ill.-based company operates nearly 6,300 stores, but has slowed down its expansion plans to save $500 million in the next three years, the company announced in early July.

Two years ago, developers had won approval to build a 14,700-square-foot Walgreens drugstore at 1925 Curry Road. HDB Ventures LLC of New Jersey had planned to demolish the plaza and begin construction last year.

It never happened. Property owner Jeff Musiker said HDB Ventures never even bought the property from him, despite a contract dating back more than two years. He said he's heard nothing about Walgreens abandoning the project.

"I don't know what's going to happen," he said. "As far as I know, Walgreens has a commitment."

Calls to HDB weren't returned.

The delay has left Musiker holding a plaza with no tenants. With storefronts empty and weeds growing around the perimeter, it's become an eyesore for the town and a weight on Musiker's back.

"I'm sitting on a building with no income and all the expenses," said Musiker, a stockbroker and financial adviser with Wachovia who owns the property through his own business, IJM Associates. "I might have to put it back as a shopping center."

That may not be so easy. Most tenants have set up shop elsewhere in town.

"We're doing very well," said Jacquie Bond, owner of La Bella Salon. She left her space at Capital Plaza in January and bought a two-story building down the road.

"It was a lot of work, and we had to rush to do it," she said. "It's kind of ironic -- all the hard times we all went through, and now to see (Walgreens) fall through."

Anthony Denning, owner of Vincy's Printing, moved two blocks to a building he now owns.

"We're doing fine in our new spot," he said. "It's probably one of the best things I ever did."

The plaza was built in the 1950s with a variety of spaces on several levels for both offices and stores. It brought a lot of independent businesses together in an area increasingly being taken over by chain stores.

Town officials say they still haven't lost hope that Walgreens will come in. On Wednesday, Peter Comenzo, the senior planner, had just phoned Musiker, the property owner, to ask him to clean up the property.

"It was nice in its heyday," said Lawrence DiLallo, the town's Planning Commission chairman. "It's not nice anymore."

Alan Wechsler can be reached at 454-5469 or by e-mail at awechsler@timesunion.com.

Where's the Metroplex when you need it???

where's you brain when you need it....

Quoted from Kevin March

Where's the Metroplex when you need it???

They've spent their wad giving facade grants.  Gotta be time to apply for more funding sometime soon.

I'm speechless! ALL of those tenants that were forced to move out for nothing. Although it appears that they have all found much nicer places to set up business.

And now Rotterdam is left with yet another empty beast. In our decaying economic times, the owner will be hard pressed to find tenants. Good ones that is! What a shame.

The owner has to find new tenants!!! i can not feel sorry for him after  his other tenants had to scramble for new  locations  

I dont feel sorry for him at all - he made $ on this deal, and all the tenants, while inconvenienced, were compensated VERY well. Don't believe me? Ask the owner of Newest Lunch when he comes back from his worldwide tour funded by the lease buyout.

http://www.dailygazette.com

Quoted Text

ROTTERDAM
Walgreens backs out of Capitol Plaza
BY JUSTIN MASON Gazette Reporter

    After more than three years of maneuvering and the relocation of more than a dozen businesses from Capitol Plaza, Walgreens has decided against opening one of its pharmacies there.
    The plan had been to demolish the 1950s-era shopping center at busy Curry Road and Altamont Avenue. But spokeswoman Carol Hively said Walgreens recently decided against opening a drug store at that location, and she offered no further explanation for the company’s decision.
    “The bottom line is we not going to open a store in Rotterdam,” she said.
    News of Walgreens withdrawal came as a surprise to most of those involved. Bob Blank, a principal with HDB and a developer for the chain drug store, said he was negotiating a deal on the property up until learning about the decision this week.
    “I’m not going to buy it without Walgreens,” he said.
    Blank suggested Walgreens’ recent downsizing of its expansion plans may have doomed the Rotterdam project. After opening more than 1,100 stores over the past three years, the nation’s largest pharmacy chain announced in July it would reduce store growth in 2010 and 2011 to conserve $500 million.
    Jeff Musiker, owner of Capitol Plaza, was caught off guard by the apparent loss of the sale after insisting the deal would go through for the past three months.
    “It’s very frustrating,” he said Thursday. “I basically have an empty plaza and all the expenses I had before.”
    Musiker was unclear about the property’s future, but said several other companies had inquired about the location over the past few years. Without a deal with Blank, he said, he plans to renovate and re-rent the plaza which sits at one of Rotterdam’s busiest intersections.
    “One thing that cannot be denied is that the plaza is in a great location,” he said. “There is no better place to do business in Rotterdam.”
    In 2005, developers proposed demolishing Capitol Plaza to make way for the 14,700-square-foot pharmacy and a 65-space parking lot. Opponents of the project — mainly the plaza’s 14 business tenants — argued there were already too many chain pharmacies in the town and that another would merely displace viable businesses.
    But Blank insisted his company would help relocate the businesses with long-term leases to other areas of the town. He even suggested the company might help provide money for their move, provided the project received town approval.
    In July 2006, the Rotterdam Planning Commission accepted the plans contingent on the developer acquiring a sliver of state Department of Transportation-owned land adjacent to the plaza which it said was needed to allow enough room for the proposed parking lot.
    Plans for the project remained stalled until it was determined the land actually belonged to Schenectady County, which promptly sold it to Musiker for $25,000 in April 2007.
    With demolition seeming inevitable, many of the businesses vacated Capitol Plaza. Alesio Chiropractic was the last to leave the building in February, with Blank assuring the project would move forward sometime in March.
    Since that time, the project’s special use permit for the Walgreens’ drivethrough has expired. And this week, town officials approached Musiker about upkeep on the derelict property.
    “It’s an eyesore,” said Planning Commission Chairman Lawrence DiLallo. “We looked forward to having a new building in that site and now we don’t know what’s in store for us.”
    Capitol Plaza is among three dilapidated commercial properties along the Curry Road corridor. Plans to redevelop the mostly vacant Curry Road Shopping Center into 94 condominiums has remained stalled for nearly a year, while there seem to be no plans in the works to redevelop a dilapidated mixed-use building at the Guilderland Avenue intersection after it was purchased by CVS Pharmacy in March.
    Meanwhile, many of the business owners that once occupied Capitol Plaza say they’ve experienced more success at their new locations than in the aging mini-mall, which they said was short on parking and occasionally flooded.
    Terri Ferrara, one of the owners of the Ferrara Dance Studio, said being forced out of the plaza where her business was located for more than four decades was a blessing in disguise.
    “There’s a silver lining in every cloud,” she said of her new location on Hamburg Street, near the Fasula Boulevard intersection. “For us we’re much happier where we are now.”
    However, the move didn’t come cheap. Ferrara said the studio spent about $12,000 to build the wood floor at its new location, a cost that Blank had initially pledged to cover.
    Nearly a year after the move, Ferrara is still waiting. She said she last contacted Blank in March, when the developer insisted he’d cover her expenses once his deal with Musiker was signed. It was the last time she heard from him, she said.
    “It was nothing but an empty promise,” she said.
    Likewise, the management at Regal Dry Cleaners said the business hadn’t received any help in relocating. Denise Skokan said the company was on a month-to-month lease, so there was never any compulsion for the developers to help them move them to their new spot off Curry Road.
    “It’s turned out to be a much better location, so they actually did us a favor,” she said.

Oh well, we can put in the historical books just like the curry road plaza......that is what we will be known for ....a nice place to live among crappy empty buildings......all while forking over money to metroplex.......go figure.......while I find the novel idea of metroplex to be a good thing.....I think owners/investors should be held more accountable......and maybe working more closely with 'the government' babysitter/feeder to teach folks to fish rather than to hand out the fish would serve us/ourselves better.......after all our government IS us and our society........ya'll better spread it around better......

Well at least we have another landmark to use when giving directions.

'Pass the EMPTY old Grand Union (Hamburg St), take a right on Curry and pass the EMPTY Capital Plaza. Take a left on Curry and pass the EMPTY Curry Road Shopping Center. Go straight until you come to the EMPTY (we don't know what to call it) building on the corner of Curry and Guilderland Ave.. Take a right on Guilderland and take a left on Vischer Ave and pass the EMPTY old Draper school.'

And who says we need a GPS?