Syracuse, NY – Until this spring, the owners of the former Marsellus Casket Co. factory on Richmond Avenue were working to attract a developer to breathe new life into the 121-year-old building. The recession and the building’s condition proved too discouraging, said Bart Feinberg, the Sutton Real Estate Co. broker working with Richmond Ave. Development LLC, the Westchester County...
The outside of the former Marsellus Casket Co. building on Richmond Avenue in Syracuse as it appeared in November.Syracuse, NY – Until this spring, the owners of the former Marsellus Casket Co. factory on Richmond Avenue were working to attract a developer to breathe new life into the 121-year-old building.
The recession and the building’s condition proved too discouraging, said Bart Feinberg, the Sutton Real Estate Co. broker working with Richmond Ave. Development LLC, the Westchester County investment group that owns the building.
Whatever vision the owners had could well have been destroyed this morning by a fire that devastated the building.
Feinberg, who learned about the blaze while working out at the gym, said he would call them this morning to break the news.
“That will be their decision as to moving forward,” Feinberg said. “The condition, from what I was watching on the news this morning, didn’t look all that good, so maybe it’s a demo now.”
The 3 acre parcel that included the factory and a later, metal-sided building had been on the market for $975,000, he said.
The condition of the building had become an issue with neighbors after Service Corporation of America closed Marsellus Casket Co. and vacated the factory in 2003.
An investment group that included Eli Hadad owned the building until 2007, when the current owners acquired it.
A rusty, barb-wire-topped fence failed to keep graffiti artists away. A fire in January 2009 hit the second floor in what had been the factory’s offices.
“There has always been people that have broken into there. Whenever we have gone in, you could see that people have been inside,” Feinberg said. “And I would imagine even today that maybe that’s what set it off.”
The condition hampered development efforts, Feinberg said. Most plans that had been explored entailed turning the first floor into commercial space and making the upper floors residential.
“We’ve gone down the road with a number of different development-type plans with various developers and the economics just didn’t pan out,” Feinberg said. “It was a tough project. Just because of the condition of the building, if you needed to demolish it it would be extremely expensive to bring it back on line. To do an economically feasible project, if you were to build it as commercial, like a mixed-use project, it would be very difficult to obtain the necessary rents to cover the project.”