MARCY — Planning is moving forward on the Tech Barn mixed-use project that will serve as the entrance point to the Marcy SUNY Parkway corridor and set the tone for the Marcy Nanocenter campus beyond it. Park Grove Realty LLC of Rochester landed the developer’s contract for the project late last year and has been […]
MARCY — Planning is moving forward on the Tech Barn mixed-use project that will serve as the entrance point to the Marcy SUNY Parkway corridor and set the tone for the Marcy Nanocenter campus beyond it.
Park Grove Realty LLC of Rochester landed the developer’s contract for the project late last year and has been busy this year designing a project worth of Mohawk Valley EDGE’s vision, says Andrew Crossed, co-founder and managing partner at Park Grove.
“This project will potentially be the first thing everybody sees when they drive into SUNY,” he says, so it needs to be state-of-the-art and high-level with high- tech businesses Wolfspeed and Danfoss Silicon Power just a little further up the road.
The mixed-use development project is centered around a main building that includes 20,000 square feet of ground-floor commercial space with apartments above. The entire project includes a secondary commercial building, two additional apartment buildings, a parking garage for tenants, and townhomes. In all, the project includes 42,000 square feet of commercial space and 232 apartments ranging from one to three bedrooms on approximately 25 acres.
“The apartments would be very high-end, market-rate apartments, which we feel is very needed in the marketplace,” Crossed says. Commercial tenants could include professional services that support the Nanocenter campus or convenience businesses.
“We’ve been working with Wolfspeed with what they need to attract people,” he says. Wolfspeed’s silicon-carbide chip fabrication facility opened in April and already employs more than 300 people. When fully operational, it will have 600 or more employees.
The Tech Barn apartments will feature a number of amenities including a pool, fitness center, fire pit and seating area, wine lounge, private wine lockers, and a dog park, Crossed says. “It’ll be very connected to the rest of the campus.”
Crossed says he’s very excited to be working with Mohawk Valley EDGE on the project. “We just think that what they have done on this campus has been great for the community as a whole,” he says.
Park Grove will spend the next several months putting its design before the necessary planning boards for approval. “We anticipate that going through the summer into the fall,” Crossed says. He is hopeful the project will break ground in the first quarter of 2023, but that will be impacted by external factors include construction labor shortages and increasing construction costs.
Construction costs have already increased about 35 percent since the beginning of this year, he says, and that can have a big impact on the project with a total price tag exceeding $60 million.
Park Grove did receive $1 million in Consolidated Funding Application funds from the state for infrastructure improvements on the site, and that will help move the project along, Crossed says.
In the meantime, the company is fine tuning the design with in-ARCHITECTS, a Syracuse–based architecture firm. Additionally, Endwell–based Delta Engineers, Architects, & Surveyors is the project’s civil-engineering firm.
Once Park Grove breaks ground, Crossed expects the first building to take about 14 months to construct.
Founded in 2015 by Crossed and Andrew Bodewes, Park Grove Realty is a real-estate development and management company based at 46 Prince St. in Rochester. The company focuses on multi-family residential, mixed-use, and commercial projects.