Pine Hills asks what's next when Saint Rose closes:
https://www.timesunion.com/education...s-18532851.php
"A dormitory might become a single-room-occupancy boarding house for men. Another college building could become a clinic to treat substance use disorders.
As the once-bustling College of Saint Rose buildings are sold and new owners seek permits, neighbors are watching with increasing alarm.
"Everybody's getting slapped in the face, that's for sure," said Noori Mirwais, who counts on foot traffic from the college at Madison Pizza, the restaurant he manages at the corner of Ontario Street and Madison Avenue.
“However you look at it, it’s going to be a mess,” said long-time neighborhood resident Ric Chesser.
The news last month that the 103-year-old college would close its doors after the 2024 spring semester has shaken the neighborhood's residents and businesses. The fate of the college's 87 properties remains unclear. The college's Board of Trustees will try to sell the properties to make whole the school's bondholders, who have control of the college's $48 million debt. Whatever comes next for the 48 acres the college owns will reshape the city's Pine Hills neighborhood for decades.
The boarding house idea for 568 Morris St. comes officially from the College of Saint Rose, which still owns Morris Hall, but is in the process of selling it to developers who would run the house. Meanwhile, the addiction recovery nonprofit Hope House already purchased two college properties on Madison Avenue.
History turns to questions
The Pine Hills neighborhood was Albany’s first “streetcar suburb” – a neighborhood made possible by the growing trolley network that allowed people to live farther from their downtown workplaces.
The creation of Albany's Washington Park by state Legislature action in 1869 encouraged interest in building residential neighborhoods to the west of the park. Two Albany attorneys, Gaylord Logan and Lewis Pratt, used a $100,000 bank loan that same year to buy up property. The covenants attached to Albany Land Improvement Company sales from 1888 to 1893, which required uses to not be turned over to commercial activities, no doubt influenced what the neighborhood looks like today.
Saint Rose followed other Catholic institutions that entered the neighborhood. It started in 1920 with a class of just 19 women in a large home with a wrap-around porch at 979 Madison Ave. Everything from student housing to classrooms to faculty housing to a chapel was in that building, now known as Moran Hall.
The college grew over time but expanded rapidly between 2000 and 2012, a period in which it spent $100 million on new campus facilities.
Chesser was among the voices that argued that Saint Rose should not have been allowed to demolish about a dozen houses in the neighborhood for new school buildings in 2010.
“And now we’re about to deal with their rotting corpses,” he said.
Dannielle Melendez, the president of the Pine Hills neighborhood association, said the group’s greatest concern is that the college's buildings will be empty.
“We do not want to see any vacancies because that is detrimental to a community and I think that it's important for us all to work together and to fill those vacancies,” she said.
Melendez, who received her MBA from Saint Rose's Huether School of Business in 2017, took over as president of the neighborhood association just weeks before the Saint Rose board voted Nov. 30 to close the school.
She and her husband bought a home in the neighborhood and have Saint Rose students as neighbors. The couple was drawn to the idea of a walkable, vibrant neighborhood that includes a mix of students, renters and long-time residents.
“And since moving there, we have enjoyed all that,” she said. “We've enjoyed walking to places, the restaurant strip on Madison, our local flower shop, our local pizza shops. Saint Rose is built into our neighborhoods.”
Melendez said the school’s financial struggles were on the neighborhood association’s radar but she assumed it would merge with another school.
But she struck a tone of optimism about the potential changes. The neighborhood association plans to hold a roundtable discussion on the future of the campus at 7 p.m. on Jan 18 at the Hanner Center, 391 Western Ave.
“I'm very hopeful for the future so it's not something that is doom and gloom,” she said. “I know that it's going to be a process and that the Pine Hills Neighborhood Association, we're going to want to be a part of that discussion.”
Finding a new use
As the college expanded over the years, houses in the neighborhood were replaced with school buildings. While some, like the dorms, could become apartment buildings, others are going to be harder to reuse.
Four Queen Anne-style homes were demolished for the 56,000-square-foot Thelma P. Lally School of Education on Madison Avenue. Its size will limit potential new uses. However, that building is close to the street – while others are tucked back, with entrances on internal roads or paths, posing potential challenges to reintegrating them with the neighborhood.
The William Randolph Hearst Center for Communications and Interactive Media is among those that can’t easily be seen from the main road. It opened in 2010 as a 20,400-square-foot facility that includes a television studio and control room, an Internet radio station, two recording studios, a performance venue, and computer labs.
And then there’s the Massry Center for the Arts, a three-story building designed for recitals – but not theater shows, which require different amenities for lights and other staging requirements. It’s 46,000 square feet with mostly classrooms and a recital hall that seats 400 people.
Chesser and other residents fear such buildings will wind up vacant long term.
"What I fear is it being done piecemeal, and so all the things that aren’t easily convertible to something else will just end up being abandoned," Chesser said.
Bruce Roter, a Saint Rose professor who wrote the music used at the inauguration of the Massry Center, proposed on his blog at saintroseexposed.org that the center should become the Pine Hills Arts Center.
Roter sued the college after he and other music professors were laid off when their program was eliminated in one of the college's past attempts to resolve its growing deficit.
“How poignant it would be if music professors who were laid off in 2022 were able to return to pursue their passion at the Massry Center,” he wrote in an email.
Seeking stabilization
For business owners, the news that the school will cease to exist is the latest blow in what is becoming an increasingly difficult landscape to operate in.
Madison Pizza's Mirwais said that 15 to 20 percent of his business comes from Saint Rose students. After more than three decades in business, the pizzeria has become attuned to the seasonal nature of a clientele largely made up of college students. The college closing will be a different thing entirely and not just for his shop, he said.
"It's going to be a big problem for the city of Albany, what are they going to do?" he asked. "What kind of neighborhood is going to be here?"
Business owners and workers at several retailers near the college said that the area had been in a period of decline well before Saint Rose's troubles came to light.
The Capital Region Chamber, the area's chamber of commerce, does not have exact figures on how much Saint Rose students contribute to the economy of the neighborhood around the college but noted that census data shows a 16 percent decrease in college-aged students living in the Pine Hills area between 2016 and 2021.
"We are getting less and less business every year," said Bajradhar Bajracharya, owner of 212 Market on Quail Street, a cavernous one-stop shop selling beer, instant noodles, vapes, toiletries and a host of college essentials.
Chesser just hopes the city and neighbors will create a plan for the entire three-block area.
“I don’t want, on July 1, to have three city blocks empty with red Xs on every window and door,” he said, describing the signs the city places on derelict buildings. “If it becomes a feeding frenzy, then that’s a completely different nightmare.”
Common Council member Owusu Anane, who represents an area that includes part of the college, said the city would explore every avenue to find a way to further develop around the campus.
Mark Eagan, the chamber's CEO, said the organization would work to support neighborhood businesses during the transition period after the college closes.
"There is a concerted effort underway to repurpose the campus with a mix of tenants that will be complementary to area businesses and add to the economic vibrancy of the neighborhood," he said in a prepared statement.
Albany Mayor Kathy Sheehan has said she is "optimistic" some form of higher education instruction will be carried out by other institutions in at least some of the buildings currently occupied by Saint Rose. The University at Albany said in a statement that it's too early to say, but that it is committed to the neighborhood – where it also has buildings – and would assist "in whatever ways make strategic and operational sense for UAlbany and that our campus resources permit."
In the short term, Saint Rose students are scrambling to figure out where they should transfer to complete their degrees. It will still be months before the community learns how the closure will impact ownership of the buildings and what the path forward for redevelopment might look like.
At Madison Wine and Spirits on Madison Avenue, clerk Matthew Bartosh is one of the lucky ones. He is graduating from Saint Rose in May after completing the school's MBA program. Bartosh said the store's owner told him Saint Rose students, particularly sports teams, were a valuable part of his customer base.
"Hopefully the businesses like this and the surrounding ones can find a strategy to rebound," Bartosh said."
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