"Downtown developer Rocco Termini plans to spend $80 million to $100 million on redeveloping the former AM&A department store downtown, possibly in as little as a year, but said he’ll need government help to do it. Termini, who has started converting three former AM&A warehouse buildings into apartments and office space, told the directors of Buffalo Place Wednesday that he has begun discussions with various planners and designers to help on the project.

As part of his plan, he applied for and obtained from the State Historic Preservation Office a designation of the AM&A buildings as a historic district. That prevents the historic portions from being torn down, while making the entire project eligible for historic tax credits. He said the AM&A’s project, the Statler Towers and the 500 block of Main Street should be priorities for redevelopment efforts downtown. But he acknowledged the challenge posed by the AM&A’s store, which has been the biggest hurdle in any redevelopment effort for the long vacant but highly visible cluster of buildings.

Termini, through his Signature Development Buffalo LLC firm, started work a month ago on his $11 million effort to turn three of the four former AM&A warehouse buildings at 369 Washington Street into 65,000 square feet of residential and commercial space. The five-story buildings were full of debris and asbestos, but workers have mostly taken out the trash in the last four weeks and are finishing up asbestos removal. Construction work will begin in one to two weeks, he said. The architect on the project is Carmina Wood Morris PC.

Termini is planning to convert the buildings into 48 apartments, a collections office and a surface parking lot. Plans call for 36 one-bedroom apartments and 12 with two bedrooms. The first floor will be 15,000 square feet of office space, which will be occupied by P&B Acquisitions, which owns the Philips & Burns debt collection agency. The fourth building, a three-story addition on East Eagle Street built in 1965, will be torn down and converted into 26 parking spaces.

Termini said he hopes to open the project by next March or April, and to be fully occupied on the first day. Already, he said, there are 15 people on the waiting list for apartments. The one-bedroom apartments will be priced at $795 a month, while the two-bedrooms will go for $995 a month.

The cluster of AM&A buildings date back to 1886, when the J. N. Adam & Co. Department Store opened as a dry-goods store before expanding later into a broader department store. The buildings later became the flagship store of Adam, Meldrum & Anderson Co., a family-owned chain of department stores based in Buffalo that was sold in 1994 to Bon- Ton Stores.

A year later, the department store closed, reopening for only a few months in 1998 as an upscale women’s department store and restaurant before closing again. It has been vacant since early 1999, and has become an eyesore downtown, deteriorating over the years and threatened with demolition.

Various plans emerged and the buildings were even acquired by out-of-town developer New Horizons Acquisitions LLC in September 2006 for $2.05 million, with the intention of converting them into apartments and ground-floor retail. But none of the concepts progressed until Termini bought the warehouses. He is now negotiating with New Horizons to buy the store as well. Termini is already a veteran of converting vacant downtown spaces into loft apartments, having developed the IS Lofts, Ellicott Lofts, Ellicott Commons, Oak School, Webb Lofts and Oak Street Apartments." M. Scott Allen of GAR Associates, Inc. completed an appraisal for this project in 2008. 

The Buffalo News
June 2009