(Credit: Courtesy Village of Greenwich, 2023)
An image of downtown Greenwich from the village's New York Forward proposal.
The Village of Greenwich and the developers rebuilding the historic Wilmarth Building on Main Street have won a $1.6 million Restore NY grant, Mayor Pamela Fuller told FoothillsBusinessDaily.com in an interview. The money will go toward reconstruction of the Wilmarth Building that was burned to the ground a year ago in an act of arson. The money will also go toward rehabilitation of the buildings on each side of the Wilmarth that were also damaged in the fire.
"We got the grant, we already started meeting with ESD to talk about the process,” the mayor said. Empire State Development issues and tracks the grants. The grant was awarded at the end of last year.
The village and developers must fund the project first, and then ESD will refund them the money.
"We have to come up with a budget. We have to come up with a plan,” Fuller said. Flatley Read, Inc., a community development company on Spring Street in Schuylerville, owns the Wilmarth Building property and is working to rebuild, the mayor said. Flatley Read did not respond to a request for comment.
The grant money flows back to the land owners and developers in the project, and Fuller said she has taken some questions about publicly funding private development. She said the benefits are too great.
"If we did not get the grant, then the property owners would do it on their schedule," she said, adding that finding investors and funding could take a very long time. "It really will make it possible to complete the project in a timely manner."
As well, the Wilmarth Building was mixed use with commercial space on the ground floor and apartments above. The plan, according to earlier reports, was to create affordable housing in the new building.
"That [building] had five apartments in it. So we desperately need housing units in the village,” she said. "For the good of the village, we need those units replaced."
According to a statement by the ESD, the project will create over 10,000 square feet of commercial space and seven new apartments.
The Restore NY grant is different from the NY Forward grant, for which both Greenwich and Schuylerville have applied. NY Forward grants are larger and are generally aimed at areas that need multiple projects completed together. They are similar to Downtown Revitalization Initiative grant funding for the state, but NY Forward is aimed at smaller villages. The first round of NY Forward grants have not been announced.
[Read about Schuylerville’s NY Forward grant here.]
The Restore NY grant is part of Greenwich's larger NY Forward application which lists about $2.9 million in total investment on that block.
The Wilmarth building was built in 1892 and is part of the Village of Greenwich’s National Historic District designation. It burned in February 2022. John Fox admitted to starting the fire and was sentenced 15 years in prison last September.
[Read more about the fire in the Post-Star, here.]