VOORHEESVILLE — The Voorheesville Planning Commission was recently presented with a proposed project that could dramatically change the village’s Main Street area. 

Representatives from Business For Good, the not-for-profit arm of local-boy-made-good Ed Mitzen, were on hand at the Feb. 15 planning commission meeting, providing members the latest update on a project first brought to the village 10 months ago. 

Three properties near Village Hall — 40, 42, and 43 South Main St. — have had, or are due to have, their current on-site building demolished to make way for a new restaurant, café, and parking lot. 

The limited-liability company associated with Mitzen paid a cumulative $810,000 for the three properties: 

— $350,000 for 42 South Main St., once a Stewart’s shop, and now proposed to be a 5,500-square-foot restaurant;

— $150,000 for 43 South Main St., a dentist’s office in a Victorian building slated for demolition to be replaced with another two-story building with two apartments on the second floor and a bike café occupying the first; and

— $309,900 for 40 South Main St., a four-unit apartment Victorian building, with a tower, which is due to be razed to make way for a parking lot for the new restaurant next door. 

Commission Chairman Steve Reilly told The Enterprise this week a lot of excellent conversation took place on Feb. 15, which extended beyond Business For Good’s proposal, with the discussion veering into “the legacy of the village, the history of the village, and changes that probably are necessary,” and how hopefully those changes will “harmonize with that history.”

Reilly said the commission felt the building razed at 43 South Main St. and the one constructed in its place works well, that the new two-story structure might actually keep with the character of the neighboring building. But the proposed restaurant “may need to have some additional thought poured into it about how it might fit in better,” both stylistically and spatially.

Asked what stood out in the presentation to the commission, Reilly said Business For Good was striving to reflect some of what Mitzen remembered when he was growing up in the village in addition to incorporating what Business For Good heard from residents at a late October event put on by the not-for-profit,  when 300 attendees were asked to fill out a 14-question survey about their dining preferences

Reilly said, “These drawings pretty well reflect the conclusions that were made” this past fall when villagers “had a chance to stand up and talk about” what they thought they’d like to see on South Main Street: a tavern-like restaurant, with a sports theme that also incorporated the “rail-trail ideologies” of people traveling to the village along the Albany County Helderberg-Hudson Rail Trail, thus the proposed Blackbird Bike Café.

Voorheesville, which developed because of the railroad, is at the head of the recreational trail that stretches to the Port of Albany. 

Reilly, an architect, said he thought commission members collectively felt the proposal was “on a very good path,” but said he thought there’s still room for discussion about “refining built environments,” and pointed to the size and shape of the proposed restaurant at 42 South Main St. as an example, because the building’s proposed dimensions impact the sites around it, like the adjacent 40 South Main St., where the homes of four village residents are being demolished “for the sake of providing parking.”

But parking has always been an issue, Reilly said. “Taking buildings down specifically for parking is a very tough conversation,” he said.

In a letter to the Enterprise editor this week, Voorheesville resident Steven Schreiber points out that the village’s Main Street Plan found, of 130 parking spaces, well over half are unoccupied daily with nearly all of the surveyed spaces vacant in the evening.

Schreiber suggests that restaurant patrons could walk for a few minutes from their parked cars rather than having to have a century-old building demolished for a parking lot adjacent to the proposed restaurant.

When Mitzen was before the commission last April with only a restaurant proposal, parking was one of the first things he brought up, and he said at the time he thought that some kind of off-street parking would have to be made available. 

One meeting attendee was particularly concerned about the loss of affordable housing options in the village, Reilly said, adding, “I think everybody heard that message loud and clear.” With over $450,000 being spent on properties just to knock them down, Reilly said, “I don’t think the gravity of that escapes any of us.”

That’s “why this process cannot be rushed,” he said; there are decisions that need to be made about how to address proposals that come before the village, if not with the current project before the planning commission then with a “collective vision down the line” of how Voorheesville will go about reusing other buildings.

Reilly didn’t “know for sure,” but said there might be a time and place where that “collective vision” could be put to use: Down the other end of South Main Street, where some buildings could be “adaptively reused and turned into housing.”

Alan Kowlowitz, chairman of the Voorheesville and New Scotland Joint Historic Preservation Committee, has a point of view: Every building has a story, he told The Enterprise, and is tied to a community, which makes it historic in a sense. 

But the argument can’t be made that every building is of such importance that the structure itself needs to be saved — though some pieces are worth holding on to. Kowlowitz said he wasn’t sure the save argument could be made for 40 and 43 South Main St., but said 43 South Main does have a number of architectural elements that could be retrieved and reused, like its corbels. 

Reilly said Business For Good was asked by the commission if it intended to provide additional apartments for the ones it planned to raze, with Reilly asking specifically if apartments could be placed above the restaurant. 

“I think at that point, they had not really been able to figure out how to do that without the building becoming pretty imposing, physically,” he said. Reilly said the commission asked Business For Good to take another look at putting apartments above 42 South Main. “So we’ll see what they come up with in March,” he said. 

Reilly said he thought the not-for-profit hoped to be back before the commission at its March 8 meeting. Business For Good did not respond to a request for an interview. 

At the other end of the village, at 112 Maple Ave., the turn-of- the-last-century tavern that Stewart’s Shops had planned to demolish since it couldn’t build a gas station and convenience store there has now been sold to someone who plans a restaurant on the site.