OLD BUILDING, NEW OWNER
Local architect Scott Dutton buys former shirt factory behind YMCA in Midtown
A Kingston architect who has played a significant role in the restoration and reuse of city buildings has purchased a former shirt factory on Pine Grove Avenue.
Scott Dutton closed on the Fuller Shirt Factory building on Tuesday, though he declined to say how much he paid for it. The 67,000-square-foot brick and wood-frame building stands behind the YMCA of Kingston and Ulster County.
The building was constructed in 1847 to house the Hudson River Lumberyard, was home to the shirt factory from 1892 until the mid-1940s, was expanded in 1947 and now is partly occupied by River Radiology.
River Radiology, which bought the building in 2000 and sold it to Dutton, occupies about one-third of the space and will remain as a tenant, the architect said.
Plans for the rest of the building still are being developed, but Dutton expects much of it will be leased out in 300to 400-square-foot sections to serve as work spaces for professional and creative concerns.
First, though, “we have a tremendous amount of work to do over the summer,” Dutton said, noting the building needs a new roof and many windows replaced.
“So we are primarily focused on that, and plans for the interior will evolve,” he said.
Dutton bought the 28,000-square-foot former Canfield Supply Co. building, on Canfield Street near City Hall, in 2000 and said he has “seen a demand for small work spaces.”
“We have made spaces for a multitude of tenants,” he said.
“It has been fully occupied for the past five years, and I have been turning people away for the last couple of years.”
Dutton lives in the Canfield building and also has the offices of his architectural firm, Scott Dutton Associates, in the structure.
Dutton has served as an architect for a number of private developers who have renovated building is Midtown Kingston and has worked with RUPCO on several of its affordable housing projects, including the one in the renovated Lace Mill building on Cornell Street.
In Uptown Kingston, Dutton is the architect for a boutique hotel being developed on Wall Street and another planned for Pearl Street.
He also was the architect for the renovation of former Ulster Academy building on West Chestnut Street in Kingston and the former St. Peter’s School on Adams Street in the city’s Rondout district after a fire there.