VOORHEESVILLE — Voorheesville is making good on a pledge to increase parking in the village center to accommodate new businesses in the area.

“We just inked an agreement to purchase the hardware store,” Mayor Rich Straut said Friday of the former Phillips Hardware at 18 South Main Street. 

The village is paying $170,000 for the property; the deal is expected to close in January. 

Straut said Voorheesville was given the first shot to purchase the property before it was put on the market. “We decided we really need this to save parking,” Straut said. Adding that it was important for the village because “we had a parking deficit.”

The purchase was made necessary due to the addition of multiple restaurants in the village. Within the past year, not-for-profit Business for Good has opened a coffee shop and restaurant at the intersection of Main Street and Voorheesville Avenue. 

Parking had been an issue since the project was first proposed in April 2021; the two restaurants needed 83 parking spaces to comply with village code, but were approved with fewer than 40 spots. 

The first part of the village plan to increase parking involved adding parking capacity at two Village Hall lots, from 27 to approximately 50 spaces. The purchase of the former Phillips Hardware will add 40 public spots to the village. 

Phillips closed the Voorheesville shop in November 2020, after 27 years in business. 

The store had “never really grown to be a big financial producer for Phillips Hardware,” Jonathan Phillips, the owner and president of the company, said at the time. 

The Voorheesville store also served other purposes for the company — a lot of commercial billing was done out of the store and it was where he and his wife, Amy, had their office — Phillips said four years ago. He kept the store open in part out of loyalty to the local clientele, his friends who lived in the community, and the commercial accounts the store serviced in Voorheesville. 

The building at 18 South Main Street in the heart of the village, had been home to another hardware store before Phillips bought it. W.W. Crannell Lumber, which also ran a lumber yard in Voorheesville, had occupied the site for decades.

As for the village’s other plans for the property, Straut said, “We will spend some time to figure out what that might be.” The mayor said, “We’ve got to further assess the building. I mean, it’s in pretty rough shape. So, we’ve got to determine what we’re going to do with the building and what else we might do there.”