Center for Orthotic & Prosthetic Care coming to Syracuse

SYRACUSE  —  A southern company specializing in orthotics and prosthetics plans to open a location in Syracuse in the middle of January.

The Center for Orthotic & Prosthetic Care expects to open a 2,500-square-foot office at 522 Liberty Street. It will be the firm’s fourth location in New York State, joining offices in Elmira, Binghamton, and Cooperstown.

The Center for Orthotic & Prosthetic Care, which has main offices in Durham, N.C. and Louisville, Ky., operates 13 locations in Kentucky, Indiana, and North Carolina, in addition to its New York outposts. Its Syracuse expansion will start with three employees but could grow to as many as 12 workers in the future.

“It’s not a high-volume business because everything we do is custom,” says Anthony Marschall, who will be the Syracuse office’s branch manager. “So in general, for one practitioner, you might see eight to ten patients per day.”

In addition to being branch manager, Marschall will be the Syracuse office’s practitioner. He will be joined by a technician and office support worker.

“We’ll do everything from patient evaluations to fittings,” Marschall adds. “This office will have an onsite lab so we can do some fabrication, and then for more major projects, the company uses central fabrication.”

Marschall will be coming to the Syracuse office after working at the Center for Orthotic & Prosthetic Care’s Cooperstown location. The company hopes to generate more than $1 million in revenue in its first year in Syracuse and grow in subsequent years, he says.

He cannot release specific companywide sales totals for the Center for Orthotic & Prosthetic Care. The firm is a “multi-million dollar” company, he says.

Its Syracuse office is set to move into newly renovated space. The building at 522 Liberty St. is being overhauled by its owner, the Syracuse development firm Salt City Enterprises, LLC.

Salt City Enterprises purchased the building at the end of June for $150,000, according to records from Onondaga County’s Office of Real Property Tax Services. It has since added a second floor to the structure, doubling its space to 5,000 square feet, according to Leonard Montreal, who co-owns Salt City Enterprises along with Samuel Flatt.

The development company’s affiliated construction firm, Montreal Construction of Syracuse — also co-owned by Montreal and Flatt — is handling the renovations at the Liberty Street building, Montreal says. He declines to share the cost of renovations, but notes that Solvay Bank is providing financing.

The Center for Orthotic & Prosthetic Care is moving into the building’s ground floor, a space customized for its needs, according to Montreal. It will later have the option of moving into the 2,500-square-foot second floor.

“We made that, so they can expand into it, a vanilla box,” he says. “The idea is for them to start on the ground floor and move up.”

The Liberty Street property is one of almost 30 Salt City Enterprises owns between Syracuse’s Inner Harbor and Hiawatha Boulevard. It has invested more than $8 million purchasing and rehabbing properties in the area, Montreal says.

“There’s a lot of good stuff happening,” he says. “The city has been kind enough to promise in the spring to do the curbs and walks for the remainder of Liberty Street. It’s like putting on a picture frame. It just cleans everything up nicely.”

Allegiance Realty, LLC of Syracuse brokered the Center for Orthotic & Prosthetic Care’s leasing of the Liberty Street building. That company is co-owned by Montreal, Flatt, and broker Jeffrey Kelsen.

“There’s no better location,” Kelsen says. “It’s fantastic to get them to go from a spot that was heavy industrial that’s now starting to migrate toward medical.”

Contact Seltzer at rseltzer@cnybj.com