One Park Place building renovations near completion

SYRACUSE — One Park Place owner Zamir Equities is headed into the home stretch of a multi-year, multi-million-dollar renovation of the property at 300 South State St. in Syracuse.

Zamir purchased the office building in 2017 — for $9.9 million, according to Onondaga County property records — and decided a year later to invest in upgrading the amenities, aesthetics, and HVAC system in the building, which was built in 1983.

“We’ve done a lot,” Jenni Sullivan, property manager, says. To date, Zamir has spent $7.8 million on the nearly 297,000-square-foot building including upgraded exterior lights and a completely renovated lobby. 

New modern elevators use a destination dispatch system for the 10-story building. Tenants now use a kiosk in the lobby and push a button for the floor they need. The elevator system is then able to group passengers based on the floors needed and lets people know which elevator to board. “It’s a quicker response to get people to and from their destination,” Sullivan notes.

Along with modernizing the elevators, Zamir Equities also created a common space on the building’s garden level that features games, tables, televisions, and other amenities that tenants can enjoy during break times or utilize for meetings.

Zamir also recently wrapped up construction of a new fitness center for building tenants, which include The Hartford, several federal-government offices including the Social Security Administration, and Haylor, Freyer & Coon. The building is also home to Jail Hoss Rock Café on the ground floor.

The new 4,200-square-foot fitness center features a variety of exercise equipment such as steppers, bikes, treadmills, and elliptical machines, along with free weights, locker rooms, a meditation room, and a yoga room.

“It’s a really nice amenity for our building,” Sullivan says. “I think it’s going to be very busy and very well used.”

Next on the agenda is a conference center, she says. The building previously had a conference room on the first floor, but a tenant took over that space. Zamir plans to build out a two-room conference center with a large room that can hold 75 people and a second smaller room that can hold 30-40 people.

“We had kind of put that on hold because there weren’t very many people in the building,” Sullivan says, referencing the effect the COVID-19 pandemic has had on employees working at offices. Many of the building’s tenants split their workforce between working on site and working from home in order to follow COVID protocols.

Now, businesses are bringing more people back to the office as new cases fall to new lows, which has made the conference center a priority again, she says.

Available to all tenants on a reservation system, the conference center allows tenants to better utilize their office spaces, Sullivan notes. Zamir Equities will also expand the current 110-space parking lot as it has purchased the former Rafferty’s site located just behind One Park Place at 318 East Fayette St. That space will be converted into additional parking. She did not provide a timeline for the conference center or parking-lot projects.

When all is done, Zamir will have invested about $10 million in the building. Zamir, which also owns the One Lincoln Center building, has benefited from the
$265 million investment in Syracuse’s central business district as part of the state’s $1.5 billion New York Upstate Revitalization Initiative.

“Work is a hard thing to do,” Sullivan says. Offering amenities to tenants helps make it a little easier. “Why not give them the opportunity to enjoy a little bit of food or amenities?” she adds.

Headquartered in New York City, Zamir Equities (www.zamirequities.com) is a real estate private-equity firm. Along with One Park Place and One Lincoln Center in Syracuse, the company owns properties in Georgia, Texas, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Maryland.