Not a new construction, but a major renovation. scaffolding is up as the Student Agencies Building at 409 College Avenue undergoes major interior and exterior renovations to its second and third floors. As previously reported on the Voice, 9.660 SF is being renovated to make way for eHub, a co-working and business incubator space for startups founded by Cornell affiliates – students, faculty and staff. The project is part of a collaboration with the Entrepreneurship at Cornell program (eShip), and for its part, Cornell renovated about 5,000 SF of space in the Ag Quad’s Kennedy Hall to complement Student Agencies’ plans.
As part of the renovations, 409, which was built in 1985, gets a major facadectomy – out with the brick and its punch-out windows, in with the glass curtain walls of fixed-frame window units with metal and granite detailing. The renovations will also add a rooftop patio space to the second floor. The project had to go through Design Review since it’s a major exterior change to an MU-2 building in Collegetown, and it ended up being one of the rare cases where the planning board encouraged a bolder design. The original design can be found here. The posters on the netting are the only copies of seen of the approved final design.
The Bike Rack, 7-Eleven, and Student Agencies will remain option while the renovations are underway.
STREAM Collaborative and Taitem Engineering designed the renovations (project design and energy efficiency improvements), and Morse Construction Management is the general contractor. All three firms are based out of Ithaca. The total cost for 409’s renovation is about $2.8 million.
Plans call for a May opening.
Ithacating in Cornell Heights 
Oh cool, they fixed that awful asymmetry! The new design in the poster looks much better.
Just wanted to say thanks and bravo for all the info about the C-town projects. Much appreciated.
I forgot to add that it’s disheartening to see that the Chapter House may not get rebuilt (per Josh’s article in the Times).
[…] in Collegetown. It’s worth a read. I don’t agree with some of the insinuations (Student Agencies’ renovation of ca. 1985 409 College Avenue is not an aesthetic threat to the …), but it’s worth a […]