Still waiting for a revival
Private investment touching outskirts of Albany’s South End, but more is needed
Jahkeen Hoke said that when most people look at the South End neighborhood where he grew up, they see blight — but he sees a canvas.
Standing on South Pearl Street on a crisp afternoon, Hoke pointed out the house behind a chain link fence where his grandmother and grandfather, one of New York’s first black state troopers, lived.
Across the road is a wellmaintained liquor store. Next to it sits a vacant gas station. Farther down is a former
Rite Aid shuttered in October despite protests from the community. Keep going and you’ll find the Department of Motor Vehicles building, which is slated to move next year.
And within eyesight of Hoke’s grandmother’s house is the Times Union Center, the hub of downtown economic development. The benefits, Hoke said, barely reach down South Pearl.
“No one comes further south than the Times Union Cen-
ter. They won’t even park down here,” said Hoke, the 30-year-old co-founder of the nonprofit organization 4th Family, which works to inspire at-risk youth to pursue STEM careers, and the recently named director of the grassroots group Avillage Inc.
For decades the South End neighborhood of Albany has struggled to attract and maintain businesses, despite plans touted by city leadership to revitalize the community. The economics of the South End make it challenging to get private business there because, at the end of the day, it’s a numbers game.
The boundaries of the South End neighborhood are debated, but the Times Union based its definition on conversations with community residents and city studies.
Generally, the neighborhood begins at Madison Avenue south encompassing the Historic Pastures, Mansion and Mount Hope neighborhoods. The core of the South End typically is recognized as South Pearl Street and Morton Avenue west to
Hawk Street along Third Avenue to Sloan Street south to Second Avenue connecting back with South Pearl.
Within that core area, the South End’s population is primarily black at 67 percent and almost one in three residents are living in poverty in the neighborhood, according to the 2010 census.
“When you look at the history of how the South End or Arbor Hill or West Hill evolved into neighborhoods with very high concentrations of poverty, we are now dealing with the consequences of that,” Mayor Kathy Sheehan said. “One of the consequences of that is it’s very difficult to locate retail service in a community where you have a very high percentage of people who don’t have the buying power that a national or regional retailer needs to sustain their business model.”
City officials often point to successes through improvements to public housing and the development of the South End Campus Center, an education and job training center on Warren Street, while remarking on private investment under way at the former Doane Stuart School campus and business growth at the Port of Albany.
But little private investment occurs in the core of the South End.
“This whole area was supposed to be redeveloped,” said Carolyn Mclaughlin, former Common Council president and South End resident, gesturing out to the corner of Morton Avenue and South Pearl. “It was going to be a public square. I don’t know what happened to that idea because right here was a focal point.”
The neighborhood’s main retail drag — on South Pearl south of Madison Avenue — sports a smattering of bodegas, hair salons, and restaurants, but residents remark that it’s a shell of what it used to be.
The South End has one of the highest building vacancy rates in the city at 10.4 percent, with West Hill leading with 12 percent vacancy. The citywide vacancy rate is about 3.5 percent, according to Albany figures.
Business owners, residents and community leaders point to a negative perception that many have of the South End as the biggest hurdle to the neighborhood’s revitalization, but renewed vigor and commitment to the area could help change that image.
“I think it’s pent up energy just looking for a place to come out,” said Tom Mcpheeters, of Avillage.
‘Never a fancy neighborhood’
In the 19th and first half of the 20th century, the South End was an industrial hub along the river, with immigrants from Germany, Ireland and Italy packed into housing near factories. South Pearl was lined on both sides with small businesses.
When the federal government implemented urban renewal programs from the 1950s through the 1970s designed to improve high-density housing and separate residences from industries, highways and housing projects fragmented the neighborhood, Albany City Historian Tony Opalka explained.
At the same time, New York state leveled at least 1,500 buildings, many of them residential homes, taking up nearly 100 acres of real estate to build Empire State Plaza — development that promised to bring downtown Albany and surrounding neighborhoods back to life.
All of this marked a turning point for the South End, and for downtown Albany as a whole.
“People tell me that this was the place to be. People talk about it being a real vibrant place,” Mcpheeters said. “It wasn’t all the South Mall, but that was definitely part of it.”
Opalka said family-owned businesses were already going out of style as retail shifted to big box stores — but the announcement that some parts of the neighborhood would be demolished meant no one wanted to invest.
“It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Opalka said. “Projects were announced a very long period before they were executed. It was declared a blighted area and it’s going to be redeveloped and becomes more blighted, so we’re not going to put any money into our buildings.”
The current site of the Department of Motor Vehicles building was a grocery shopping center during the 1970s but didn’t last even 10 years, according to city records.
Opalka said that once businesses left, they weren’t replaced.
“It was never a fancy neighborhood,” he said. “Businesses were never of great quantity, a lot of it. As people moved out, not necessarily new people moved in. Buildings went on to go abandoned.”
Early improvements
Blight and crime plagued the South End in the 1990s and early 2000s, and by 2001 then-mayor Jerry Jennings touted a $200 million, five-year plan to revitalize the neighborhood.
Part of the plan aimed to demolish four red brick towers owned by Albany Housing Authority and turn them into town homes and low-rise apartments. However, when federal financing dried up the authority was only able to tear down one tower, but it was able rebuild Creighton Story Homes, a complex of two-story buildings off Third Avenue.
A broader approach to stabilize the community that has seen years of disinvestment, improve the quality of life and grow the area was released in 2007 with the Capital South Plan, which provided an aggressive timetable and ideas to remake and improve the Albany neighborhood.
It focused on Morton Avenue east to South Pearl Street and south to Third Avenue, but recognized the larger South End community encompassing the Mansion and Historic Pastures neighborhoods.
Real estate agent Chris Gallagher, who owns the Coliseum on South Pearl just south of Madison Avenue, pointed to the business incubator as a success coming out of the 2007 plan, but noted the vision could be reworked.
Gallagher bought the Coliseum in 2000, refurbishing the space into a business incubator offering affordable month-tomonth leases to entrepreneurs.
“We wanted to do something for the community that would be beneficial,” Gallagher said. “We did have companies and architecture firms we could bring in, but that didn’t do anything for the neighborhood.”
One of the successful first tenants was Angelo “Justice” Maddox Jr., a 39-year-old Brooklyn transplant who began selling products while a student at the University at Albany. He signed a lease at the Coliseum before it was even refurbished and opened his clothing store.
“In hindsight, I was taking on a big challenge, because the South End is not retail friendly and was not retail friendly when I started in 2006,” Maddox said with a smile and a shake of his head inside his store on a recent afternoon. “It was a challenge to get people comfortable with shopping in that area.”
Six years later, he moved into his own space farther north, away from the South End’s core into a higher visibility area just past the Times Union Center, and renamed the store “Fresh & Fly.”
Meanwhile, private investment has happened more frequently in the outskirts of the South End.
Sarah Reginelli, president and CEO of Capitalize Albany, the city’s economic development arm, said homeowners are making improvements in the Mansion neighborhood and on the southern edge of the community. At the former Kenwood Academy/doane Stuart site, a robust plan for apartment buildings, town homes, hotels and space for retail and public facilities like an amphitheater is in the works.
It has the potential to boost the core of the neighborhood.
“Private investment is pushing
“Your perspective is everything. That goes into the whole mentality you have of a certain place. Once you’re able to shift the perception and mentality, people will start taking more pride and more respect for the environment.” — Angelo “Justice” maddox Jr., owner of fresh & fly
into the South End,” she said. “That is all going to help change the investment dynamic to allow more private investment into the core of the South End by strengthening the surrounding community.”
Overcoming stigma
Maddox, whose business is on South Pearl, said the hardest thing to overcome is the perception of the South End.
“Your perspective is everything. That goes into the whole mentality you have of a certain place,” Maddox said. “Once you’re able to shift the perception and mentality, people will start taking more pride and more respect for the environment.”
Change likely won’t come from outside developers, so instead cultivating the talent from within the community will be key, Hoke said.
“There are more people that are of the community who want to do something,” he said. “What’s missing? Creating an apparatus to position them so they can succeed.”
Hoke said it’ll mean bringing local institutions together and having difficult conversations as well as providing necessary resources to help local entrepreneurs.
Andreas Lois, owner of South Pearl Coffee Shop, has been near the corner of Morton Avenue and South Pearl for 33 years and has seen plenty of changes — some of them for the good.
“The people like us, they respect us, and they give us a lot of support,” Lois said. “We try to keep the community together. Anything is possible to make it work.”
Deeper into the South End, local developer Corey Jones has proposed an apartment complex near the corner of Second Avenue and Krank Street. Neighbors have mixed reactions to the proposal, and Jones has yet to submit permits to begin the process.
The city will be purchasing its streetlights soon to upgrade them to more energy-efficient lighting and pave the way for other amenities, like municipal internet. Small businesses can get grants to improve facades and low-cost financing to get things started. The South End Improvement Corporation also has funds available for homeowners to make necessary updates to their homes.
Sheehan said she focuses less on what people think a neighborhood is like, and more on what can be done to improve the quality of life for its residents.
“They have incredible architecture, incredible character. They have people who care. Some people can’t see through that,” she said. “I guess I sort of focus less on that and more on what is it that the people who are living in the community, doing business in community, need in order to be successful.”
It’s possible the South End plan crafted in 2007 could be updated in the future.
“It’s an ideal time to revisit it now that we have a comprehensive plan for the city and a complete rezone for the city,” Sheehan said. “Reinvestment has occurred, but clearly (there are) zones that are crying out for investment in the future.”
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