206 Taughannock Boulevard Construction Update, 9/2015

4 09 2015

Over on Inlet Island, another project is in the home stretch towards completion. “The Apartments at 206”, Mark Zaharis’s mixed-use project at 206 Taughannock Boulevard, is mostly completed on the outside, with minor cement-board trim installation and painting ongoing. There might be some further exterior work planned with sunscreens and such, but it’s difficult to be sure since the built design doesn’t match the rendering.

A peek through the back door showed drywall being hung on the wood framing, and some utilities rough-in still going in. The project is a gut renovation of a former furniture store and warehouse, so the owners had quite a task with rebuilding the interior.

According to an older gentleman working on the site, the apartments “should be ready in two or three months, keep an eye out.” There will be four one-bedroom and three two-bedroom units, along with office space on the first floor.

Local architect Claudia Brenner penned the design of the renovated building. Last year, Brenner designed the renovation of the Lehigh Valley House next door into a mixed-use building with ground-floor commercial space, donated space for the recently-opened branch office of the IPD, and six condominiums. The Zaharises, who owned and managed the furniture store before it closed in Spring 2014, are the developers-in-charge.

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206 Taughannock Boulevard Construction Update, 6/2015

30 06 2015

These photos date from the 13th, but they’re still worth sharing (and technically, it’s still June, so calling it a June update is valid). The fiber-cement siding has been attached to most of 206 Taughannock Boulevard, where a 2-story furniture store and warehouse built in the 1970s is being converted into a mixed-use building with 7 apartments (4 1-bedroom, 3 2-bedroom). A few sections still have insulation and (what I think are) wall studs showing.

A drawing of the new plans posted in a ground floor window gives more information about the project. “The Apartments at 206”, as the new building will be called, bears only a moderate resemblance to the render provided in the window. The rendering posted, which dates from September 2014, indicates that the residential conversion was designed by local architect Claudia Brenner. Brenner designed the renovation of the Lehigh Valley House next door into a mixed-use building with ground-floor commercial spaces, other active-use (a branch police station), and six condominiums last year. It looks like the work on the Lehigh Valley House’s ground floor is still wrapping up.

Some of the trim boards are missing, the roof-line doesn’t match, and the materials don’t look quite right, especially the seemingly random gray cementboard next to the garage. Dunno what exactly is going on here, but since this didn’t need planning board review (there was no change in square footage, only a re-pruposing of the structure), the regulations aren’t there to make the structure to look like its render. Facade details and the sunscreens will be installed at some point, presumably. The renovation, estimated to cost $350,000, is the work of the Zaharis family, who owned and managed the furniture store before it closed in Spring 2014.

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206 Taughannock Construction Update, 4/2015

17 04 2015

Work has progressed at the site of the apartment project at 206 Taughannock Boulevard on Ithaca’s Inlet Island, where seven apartments and office space are being built from the gut renovation of a furniture store and warehouse. The changes on the exterior have been slow, but given this past winter, the focus of the past few months has probably been on the interior space.

Since November, a little more siding (best guess, fiber cement/Hardie board) had been installed on the exterior, and the industrial steel siding at the front side of the roof has been replaced with an irregularly-shaped plywood-and-housewrap structure. Looking at the window spacing, siding and trim boards already applied to the front of the building, this rooftop re-do is likely intended to break up the bulk of the old warehouse by giving the impression of individual buildings within the greater structure. It could look nice or it could look clunky, we’ll have to wait and see.

206 Taughannock was until 2014 the site of the Unfinished Furniture Store (otherwise called the “Real Wood Furniture Store“) owned and operated by the Zaharis family. From the county records, the building itself is a 9,156 sq ft structure originally used for retail and warehouse space and dated to sometime in the 1970s. The store closed last April when its owners retired, and a building permit issues a few months later. Photos of the store before renovation can be seen here at Ithaca Builds. Perhaps the biggest loss in this renovation is the removal of a rather attractive mural from the front of the structure.

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Next door, work continues on a satellite office for the Ithaca Police Department in the ground floor space of the former Lehigh Valley House, now a six-unit condominium. The Lehigh Valley renovation was done by local developer Tim Ciaschi, with design work by local architect Claudia Brenner.

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Two more Inlet Island projects are waiting in the wings, although only one is likely to start anytime soon. The 21-unit 323 Taughannock apartment project is expected to start construction this year, but no work appeared to be taking place when I checked the site at the start of April. Meanwhile, 12 affordable apartment units have been proposed for 910 West State Street in a project called “The Flatiron”. The developers, Alpern and Milton LLC, applied for affordable housing grant funding to help finance the project. However, the IURA has deemed the project a low priority because it wasn’t feasible as presented. The site as-is is shown below. The red building with the mansard roof would be renovated, and a structure of similar height and appearance would be built on the triangular lot to its left (west).

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