Syracuse, N.Y. -- The Syracuse University area’s newest apartment development combines a modern addition with a renovated century-old building originally built by one of the city’s best-known madames.
The Uncommon Apartments consist of 12 two-bedroom apartments in the Sylvester building, an apartment and retail building that opened on the southeast corner of East Fayette Street and Irving Avenue in 1910, and a new, four-story addition containing 30 one-bedroom apartments.
An easy walk to Syracuse University and SUNY Upstate Medical University, the apartments are already leased, half to students and half to young professionals.
The apartments are on the building’s top three floors. The first floor contains a total of 10,000 square feet of retail space. Strong Hearts Cafe, a vegan bistro, will be the first commercial tenant when it occupies 3,200 square feet of space in the new section this fall.
Rents start at $1,350 for the one-bedroom apartments and $1,425 for the two-bedroom units. Rents include utilities, cable TV, high-speed internet and use of a fitness center. Fifteen on-site and 35 off-site parking spaces are available for $125 a month.
The apartments feature granite counter tops, stainless steel appliances and secure keyless entry.
Christopher Geiger, Scott Smith and Andrew Charles are the Long Island developers behind the $10 million project.
Geiger, a 1995 Syracuse University grad, said they named it Uncommon Apartments because of the unusual combination of an historic building and a connected modern structure.
Adding to the uncommon nature of the project is the fact that every apartment in the older building is unique, with no two units the same size and layout, he said.
The older building has been designated an historic structure by the State Historic Preservation Office, partly because it is an example of Syracuse’s early 20th century apartment buildings and partly because of its association with the Progressive Era.
Its first owner, Mary B. Hand, was a prostitute and “madame” well known in Syracuse’s red-light district (a three-square block area between the Erie Canal and East Washington, Montgomery and Townsend streets) between 1886 and 1906.
Hand had the building built -- and hired Syracuse City Hall designer Charles Erastus Colton to design it. It was never a brothel, however. She built it as a place for the city’s growing middle class to live. It also served her goal of becoming a legitimate businesswoman as Progressive Era reforms led to stricter enforcement of anti-prostitution laws.
She named the building after her deceased brother, Sylvester, whose name appears in a stone plaque on the front of the building.
It sat vacant for many years until Geiger, Smith and Charles bought it for $660,000 in 2014. They planned to demolish it and build an entirely new building in its place. However, at the urging of Ben Walsh, then deputy commissioner of the city’s Department of Neighborhood & Business Development and now mayor, they decided to renovate the structure and build an addition.
The renovation restored the building’s original exterior and store fronts, making it eligible for historic state and federal tax credits. The project also is benefiting from a payment-in-lieu-of-tax agreement with the city that will save the owners $1.29 million in taxes over 10 years.
The Uncommon Apartments back up to Theory Syracuse, a 244-unit, purpose-built student apartment building opened by Peak Campus, of Atlanta, in 2018.
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