Steve Thurston (2021)
The former Children's Museum at Saratoga has moved to the Lincoln Baths in Saratoga Spa State Park. They closed on the sale of their former building March 23. It will become a community workshop that will teach woodworking and other skills.
The building once owned by the Children’s Museum at Saratoga sold for $1.95 million at a closing Wednesday March 23. The asking price when the building went on the market last May was $2.25 million.
[Read our initial story here.]
The buyer, John Haller, plans to create a nonprofit “community workshop,” in the 8,000-square-foot space in a residential neighborhood at 69 Caroline St.
The workshop, listed in the city documents as “Saratoga Community Workshop” and “Saratoga Joinery,” will include professional grade woodworking tools for the community to use and for education in the woodworking arts, the documents say. Other tools and programming may be added later.
The plan for the building went before the city’s Zoning Board of Appeals for a use variance since the building is in a residential neighborhood and "workshop" is not an acceptable use under the residential zoning.
The zoning board approved the use of the building as a workshop, citing the fact that it had not been a residential building for years—before the museum took over, it was a restaurant and a medical office building—and that converting from the museum space to a “conforming use” such as apartments would be prohibitively expensive. As well, the traffic to the building as a community workshop is expected to be less than the museum's traffic had been.
The Saratoga Springs Preservation Foundation said in a letter to the board that the city has a great need for more people skilled in woodworking trades to preserve the city’s Victorian-era buildings. Haller is a board member of the foundation, but recused himself from the discussion and vote, documents say.
“Granting the special use variance will allow Saratoga Joinery to play an important role in promoting the preservation trades in our community and beyond,” the foundation wrote in January. A handful of other letters to the zoning board all supported the purchase and new use of the building.
The building sits on just over a half acre of land and is assessed at just over $1 million dollars.
The museum has since leased space at the Lincoln Baths in Saratoga Spa State Park, and has been running a capital campaign to renovate the space. The nonprofit that runs the museum hopes to open the museum in July.
“We’re about 80% there for the new space, so we’re still raising funds to renovate the new Children’s Museum, but we’re getting close,” Brandon Ture, a board member said. “We’re psyched, we’ve got a lot of good things going on.”