Ithaca Builds

Mapping, photos and information for Ithaca construction and development projects

A Peek Inside the Future Chain Works District

March 1, 2015 // by Jason Henderson

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800,000 square feet is a lot to comprehend, especially when separated into a total of 26 buildings, built in various interlocking shapes, at different times, with various building systems, and various ceiling heights, as is the case with the Emerson site on South Hill. Including the end zones, a football field is about 57,000 square feet, so the existing structures constitute around 14 football fields of enclosed space. These photos are from a site visit taken a couple weeks ago.

For a brief history, Morse Chain first built and occupied the site from 1906 until 1928 when they were acquired by BorgWarner, which owned the property from 1928 to 1982. In 1982, BorgWarner sold the property to Emerson Power Transmission, which continued manufacturing at the site from 1983 until its closure in 2011. Unchained Properties, LLC has negotiated with Emerson for several years and obtained an agreement to acquire the site for redevelopment. The 95-acre site is being re-named the Chain Works District, with the intention of developing the site into a “live, work, play” mixed-use district.

For development rights, the project is utilizing PUD/PDZ (planned-unit development/planned development zone) zoning to fit the zoning requirements with the redevelopment site plans, and is currently in the process of writing a Draft GEIS (Generic Environmental Impact Statement) for municipal and state review. For more information about the process, see the planning page here. Some further remediation will be required on the site, but major portions have been remediated in the past few decades, and the updated environmental studies for the redevelopment project are extensive (the combined Phase I and Phase II Environmental Site Assessments go over 60,000 pages of documentation). There was an Ithaca Times article last November on the topic.

For starters, it’s easy to forget how close the site is to downtown. The building behind this shot is building 24, slated for Mixed-Use:

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The current plan involves select demolition of the structures between the long corridor buildings (the original factory is one of them) and the newer structures to the southeast:

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Here’s the northern end of Building 13B, slated for workshop space (23,200 square feet). It has a 3-Ton rack crane and loading bays:

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This shot is looking northeast in Building 3/3A. Buildings 11A, 10A, 3A, 8A, 9, and 6A are being demolished to open-up the interior space on the site. Buildings 2, 3, and 4 are slated for multi-level residential with the ground floor as parking:

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Here’s another shot in 3/3A looking the other direction (southwest) down the really long interior corridor. You can see all the way to building 6:

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Moving south, here’s a shot of Building 34, slated for manufacturing. It’s massive- Buildings 33 and 34 make up 170,000 square feet, with a clear ceiling height of about 30 feet:

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If I remember correctly, this is an upper-level of Building 6/6A, at the southwest end of the long corridor:

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The wood floor planks are about a foot thick, since they were required to hold the weight of lots of heavy machinery:

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Upper-level of Building 4:

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The views are fantastic: windows on Buildings 2 through 6 lining the hillside provide a panorama from the Southwest Area, across Downtown and the lake in the background, then up to Cornell:

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This is the NYSEG substation for South Hill:

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Upper-level of Building 8:

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Building 35, very high ceiling, and two 6-ton rack cranes:

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Shot looking the other way, Building 35 and 15:

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Ground level of Building 4, which would be used for a parking level, stretching from 2 to 4:

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Here’s the overall use-concept from the presentation materials:

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For more information about the site, the project website and Facebook page contain public meeting agendas and presentation materials.

 

Chain Works District August Meeting

August 5, 2014 // by Jason Henderson

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Unchained Properties and the project team for the 95-acre Chain Works District (former Emerson site) held a second public meeting today (August 5th), primarily to discuss their approach to zoning and to give more information on proposed site layout. Mayor Myrick began the meeting by noting that the community involvement this early-on in a project bodes well for its development, and that the local economy is seeing some of the best numbers statewide as far as unemployment, job growth, and housing creation, so this project will inevitably become a major part of the change we should continue to see in the City.

Myrick and the project team explained the reasoning behind the developer’s decision to seek a Planned Development Zone (PDZ) in the Town of Ithaca, and a Planned Unit Development (PUD) in the City of Ithaca, since the parcel is split between City and Town. The PDZ and PUD are essentially the same thing: it’s a form of zoning and regulatory process that can be approved by the municipality in order to allow a project to develop outside of the current zoning on a parcel or set of parcels.

Scott Whitham of Whitham Planning and Design observed that since the current zoning for the Emerson parcel is Industrial, it would not be applicable or realistic to a large mixed-use redevelopment, as is being proposed, so the project team is submitting zoning materials to both the City and Town to consider in their PDZ and PUD processes, which carry the same requirements as a rezoning of any other area: the community has input and commentary in public meetings throughout the process, and the rezoning would fall under the requirements of the New York State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQR), and review from the Tompkins County Planning Board. Once the zoning portion is complete, then the project team may submit Site Plan Review applications to the corresponding Planning Boards.

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Craig Jensen of Chaintreuil | Jensen | Stark Architects summarized some items from the previous presentation: several buildings would likely be demolished to create open spaces between mixed-uses, and the design team is studying similar projects that have incorporated adaptive reuse practices on former industrial sites. The 1/2 mile distance to downtown (closer than Collegetown) will make non-automotive transportation options an attractive prospect.

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In addition to working on the zoning proposal for this site, Noah Demarest of Stream Collaborative is working on combining the two Town and City Zoning Codes to conform with the Town Zoning & Comprehensive Plan and the forthcoming City of Ithaca Comprehensive Plan. The combination would be adapted into a Form-Based Zoning Code, with Transect Zones rather than the existing zones and codes we have today, which can be over-complicated and use-based, and contain more amended content than original content.

Transect and Form-based zoning seeks to establish allowable building massing as a priority over accepted uses, and emphasizes a logical transition from rural areas to urban centers, mimicking the transitions found in natural geography. More information is available from the Form-Based Codes Institute and the Center for Applied Transect Studies (which was founded by Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, who wrote the first form-based code for the town of Seaside, Florida). The zoning code suggested here is adapted from SmartCode template, which is a Transect-based subset of form-based codes.

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Transect-Based Zones are as follows: T1 (Natural) included in project, T2 (Rural) not included, T3 (Neighborhood Edge Zone) not included, T4 (Neighborhood General Zone) included in project, T5 (Neighborhood Center Zone) included in project, T6 (Central Business District Zone) not included.

The existing topography affects these zone decisions: a 15% or greater slope is not realistically developable, so there are several areas, especially towards the south end of the site that would not be developed.
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The question and answer session brought-up traffic concerns on surrounding streets. The Project Team has employed Steve Ferranti of SRF Associates to study the current and historic traffic and transportation patterns, along with trip generation estimates based on the proposal as part of the SEQR process. The team noted that mixed-use projects generally have different peak patterns than single-use, which should help with congestion. Concerns about environmental remediation and removal needs surfaced, which will be studied in detail by the team’s environmental consultant LaBella Associates throughout the same SEQR process, in both rezoning and site plan review. The response from the public was again, quite positive overall.

Emerson: Chain Works District Meeting

April 12, 2014 // by Jason Henderson

 

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The development team for the former Emerson site held a preliminary public meeting at Cinemapolis this past Thursday to present the project concept to the public. The team is an impressive group of local and upstate firms:

HARTER, SECREST AND EMERY – environmental, land use and zoning law
CHAINTREUIL │JENSEN │STARK ARCHITECTS – architecture and planning
D.I.R.T. STUDIO – landscape and site design
AUSTIN + MERGOLD – architecture, branding and outreach
FAGAN ENGINEERS & LAND SURVEYORS – civil engineering
WHITHAM PLANNING AND DESIGN – project planning approvals
STREAM COLLABORATIVE – zoning development and approvals
LA BELLA P.C. – environmental consulting

The developer is David Lubin, also of L Enterprises, the developer for Harold’s Square.

The presentation went through some history of the site, then talked about their approach and the concepts they’re hoping to use in the re-development. For starters, Emerson is a massive site: the parcels in question total to roughly 94 acres, and it’s no further from the downtown core than collegetown. The floor space of the existing buildings is 800,000 square feet, (the Chrysler Building is about 1.2 million), about the size of 10 football fields of interior space. The project will likely be a decade-long (or more), multi-phase process.

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The intent is to open-up the site, and possibly demolish buildings that were built between the 60s and 80s that don’t have a feasible re-use case, but keep the vast majority of structures built in the first half of the 20th Century. This would create open spaces between buildings that could be leveraged as public gathering places, parks, open-air restaurants, and activities. The possible future Gateway Trail (a northern extension of the South Hill Recreation Way) would cut directly through the site.

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The existing buildings have different spacial features that allow for a variety of desirable re-development scenarios. The long stretch of buildings 2, 3, and 4 are better for residential since there are reasonable floor spans between windows, whereas 13a, 13b, and 34 are more suited to manufacture and production. The co-location of housing and business space is great, since there would be several ways to walk there to and from downtown (Cayuga, Aurora, possibly Turner), and it presents the possibility of living and working on the same site. The industrial aesthetic also presents nice possibilities for creatively adapting existing spaces to keep the materials and structure exposed. Craig Jensen mentioned that one of the shop floor buildings actually has concrete slab as a supporting floor structure below 8″ solid wood floors that could be re-finished, scuff marks, oil stains and all. There’s no doubt that this could get really cool.

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A long series of planning and site plan meetings should commence this Spring. The parcel is split between the City and Town, and of course the DEC will be involved in any further environmental work. Emerson still owns the site, but contracts have been signed to allow for the purchase at the end of a year long due-diligence process.

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Emerson Subdivision Map & Surveys

August 29, 2013 // by Jason Henderson

Here are the proposed subdivision maps for the Emerson site, showing the proposed “OU-1” (0.9 acres off South Cayuga Street, contains two underground storage tanks, and a treatment building) and “OU-2” (95 acres, the rest of the site). The split looks like a deal-maker to sell the site to the potential developer in order to relinquish an overburden of remedial work on the entire parcel. Emerson’s operations here closed for good back in 2009, so it’s nice to see some forward motion on a site this massive.

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August 8, 2013 // by Jason Henderson

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The Ithaca Times Article on this is a must read.

There has never been a redevelopment project of this magnitude in Ithaca. Over 93 acres and 800,000 Square Feet of existing space is a massive undertaking, and one that will take many years to do, but now that the potential buyer will be closing on the property, there’s a tangible horizon. The cost and financing needs of this project are immense relative to other projects in Ithaca. Even if we assume an average $100/SF redevelopment cost within the existing shell structures, that brings the total cost of the project in at $80 million, assuming all 800,000 SF are built-out at this cost. I think it’s safe to say that it may even cost more depending on the mix of development, and environmental remediation will take more time and money. The exterior work will probably be quite significant as well. The potential for this site has been a major talking point in local politics for years now, so it’s nice to see a serious developer taking the reigns and the risk to realize this opportunity.