VOORHEESVILLE — The turn-of-the-last-century building at 112 Maple Ave., once the home to Smith’s Tavern, is slated for demolition. 

“As marketed, it has not generated a buyer,” said Chuck Marshall, a Stewart’s Shops real-estate representative and project manager. “Every location is a profit center, and this one has shown negative [profit].”

The company is due before the Voorheesville Planning Commission at its Feb. 15 meeting, seeking site-plan approval to knock down the building. 

Stewart’s bought the property in 2017 with the intention of building a new shop and gas station on the site but ran into issues with the village when it adopted new zoning that disallowed businesses like Stewart’s to be built in that part of the village. The property has been for sale since 2018. 

Tallying the purchase price, approvals, and other carrying costs, Marshall estimated the company had sunk close to $900,000 into the parcel, which at various times has been listed for sale for $799,000; $599,000; and $449,000.

Marshall said $449,000 is the current price. 

Marshall sees the site as hamstrung by what he says is restrictive zoning. 

He said he recently received a call from his real-estate broker, who’d been approached by a coffee chain about the site, but the deal couldn’t go anywhere because of the village’s prohibition against formula-based businesses in the area.

Formula-based businesses, according to the village, “are required by contractual or other arrangements to be virtually identical to businesses in other communities because of standardized architecture, services, merchandise, decor, uniforms and the like.”

The village adopted a comprehensive plan in June 2018 and its new zoning code based on the plan in May 2019.

The comprehensive plan, once adopted, in effect did not allow Stewart’s to build a gas station and convenience store at 112 Maple Ave. The comprehensive plan said that, in the Creekside Commercial District, “no ‘formula businesses’ should be allowed.” 

The company filed a lawsuit against the village in September 2019, claiming there had been a “targeted effort” preventing it from building at 112 Maple Ave.

Stewart’s was seeking to have the village’s zoning code declared null and void “on the ground that it fails to conform to a properly promulgated Comprehensive Plan,” the company’s original complaint stated, and it was also asking that the zoning district created by the new code around 112 Maple Ave. be declared a case of illegal spot zoning.

In November 2020, the judge in the suit, James Ferreira, tossed the case, stating in his decision that the village’s zoning code had been “reasonably related to legitimate government interests.” Ferreira also concluded it was not spot zoning because, when the village adopted new zoning, it “changed the zoning of numerous properties in the Village, including all of those in the Creekside Commercial District,” where 112 Maple Ave. is located.

Stewart’s in January 2021 asked the state Supreme Court’s Third Appellate Division  — the middle level in the state’s three-tiered court system — to overturn Ferreira’s decision and had until July of that year to file its appeal brief. 

The company also had the opportunity to ask the court for a three-month extension to file the appeal, but didn’t do that by mid-July 2021, laying to rest two years of legal wrangling and six years of development drama.

A historical view

Alan Kowlowitz, chairman of the Voorheesville and New Scotland Joint Historic Preservation Committee, said it’s interesting how the history of the building at 112 Maple Ave. tracks with the history of Voorheesville. 

“Starting out as a very small hotel at a period of time when there was a number of hotels — probably a roadhouse — that catered to people coming into Voorheesville from the hinterland of the Hilltowns,” he said, the building later transitioned into a tavern in the mid-20th Century, when there were a number of bars and taverns in the area at that time, and then transitioned once more into a family restaurant with a bar. 

The move from tavern to a family restaurant came at a time when Voorheesville was transitioning into a suburban community, he said. In his estimation, Kowlowitz said the site’s significance is derived from what Smitty’s represented to the community.

“Particularly, I think Smith’s Tavern served as a very important establishment within Voorheesville to help ease the transition from declining railroad town to a suburban community,” Kowlowitz said. “It created a safe space that everybody in the community felt was theirs. And I think that role during that period in the late 20th Century and early 21st Century is its main importance.”