Working on behalf of Artspace of Minnesota, a not-for-profit housing agency specializing in affordable housing opportunities for the special needs of low-income artists and their families, I had the opportunity to document, plan, develop specifications, resolve code issues and create a rendering for adaptive reuse of the Luckey Platt department store.
Luckey Platt department store ceased operations in 1979. The surviving corporate home remained vacant through subsequent real estate booms and busts. Allowed to deteriorate and lacking any maintenance the roof drains became blocked, allowing a load of snow and ice to crash into the upper floors and thus compromising the structure.
National register listed and significant for multiple features most notably it's four operator controlled elevators, the first in the county, its design is a benchmark example of the transformation of mercantile design underway in the early century expressed in the shopping center of today. Featuring open space floor plans with multiple departments where a customer is able to touch merchandise all illuminated by copius natural daylight. Hallmarks of retail design today, emblematic and frozen in time.
The company assembled multiple smaller parcels and structures over a period of decades, building it's flagship with a five story riveted steel frame and limestone and windowed curtain wall in the late 1920's. The last to be constructed, it replaced earlier structures on the site.
Visually it is braced left and right by other, older and no less distinctive structures such as the terra-cotta faced furniture building to the south and to the west the oldest, a five-level original Lucky Platt store front. The assemblage includes a heavy timber one-time biscuit factory structure deep within the site. The new central, delivery vehicle courtyard was provided multiple loading docks and covers a coal bin to feed the huge boilers exhausted by a huge round brick chimney. Topping all was a classic steel water tower serving the fire protection system. An enormous painted Lucky Platt appeared on the south upper masonry wall for many years.
My services included local representation before the zoning and planning boards for site plan approval, environmental audit coordination, existing condition documentation, research, historic application part 1 and the plans, specifications and cost budgeting necessary for an application before the Division of Housing and Community Renewal for the affordable housing tax credit. Surviving blueprints discovered on site facilitated the creation of a base document over which I developed the proposed design to provide 50 dwellings each in excess of 2,000SF. Grade and second levels were set aside for commercial rental opportunities. All units demonstrated compliance with the standards of the DHCR and the NYS Building Code.
Site Plan approval was achieved. DHCR applications were filed and scored well.
But for unknown reasons local leaders pulled support to offer the site to a well known artist who promised a similar but market based program. He failed to advance the project for 2 years.
Afterward, the leaders invited bids from developers and offered a cash incentive.
The winning development company, Alma from Astoria, stripped away the bronze and glass storefronts, fresnel lensed transoms, heavy wood double hung and casement windows, removed the monumental chimney and water tower, erased the elevators, closed the staircases to enable 150 market rate rental units, some of which are provided light and air from code minimum airshafts. Additions of inappropriate scale visible from the front were constructed above the oldest building. Replaced windows now display the word “friedrich” on the air conditioner grills and the first floor limestone was painted gray.
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