Commercial real estate firm Horn Companies LLC has started to transform the historic Syracuse Herald-Journal building into an apartment complex.

“It’s a very busy area,” said Chris Hornstein, a partner in the project alongside his father, Tom. “The housing market has been very affordable.”

The building, located at 220 Herald Place, will feature 27 apartments, most of which are two-bedroom on the top three floors of building. The bottom floor will contain about 10,000 square feet of office space, and 7,000 square feet of retail space. One of the major amenities of the building is the 135 parking spaces available for patrons and residents. The parking lot makes the building more ideal for restaurant and retail space, Hornstein said.

“Parking was a big factor in choosing this location,” he said.

Currently, the company has begun gutting out the interior of the building and is working to make the building solid enough to last the winter. The company has just taken asbestos out of the interior of the building and is currently patching up the roof, Hornstein added.

The building was originally built in 1928 to contain the publication, The Syracuse Herald. In 1939, the Herald merged with the Syracuse Journal to form the Syracuse Herald-Journal, which remained in the building for more than 40 years. The building also was home to the city newspaper, The Post-Standard. Both publications moved out in 1971 to a larger building in Clinton Square, according to Syracuse.com. Though the Herald stopped publishing in 2001, The Post-Standard continues to publish from there.

Hornstein and his father are planning to use a historic preservation tax credit on the property. The exemptions could be worth about $189,000, according to Syracuse.com.

The building is located on the corner of Franklin Street and Herald Place, one block north of the restaurant Dinosaur Bar-B-Que. It is also visible from Interstate 690, which Hornstein said, adds to the appeal of the location.

Hornstein said his company purchased the building in August 2014 for about $1.1 million from John Krell, a plumbing supply distributer. Krell bought the building from the city of Syracuse in 1996.

The former building that housed the publication had sat vacant for years before Horn Companies purchased the building from Krell, except for the Management Department of Onondaga County, which used 56,000 square feet of the building until moving out a couple of years ago, Hornstein said.

“The entire exterior of the building is staying the same,” Hornstein said. “We are also keeping a lot of the original woodwork on the first floor. We are just trying to keep the historical value of the property.”

This building joins many others in the past few years that have been converted into residential living in downtown areas, according to Syracuse.com. In September, Syracuse was named one of the most affordable cities for housing in the United States.

The renovation of the new building, which Horn Companies is naming Herald Commons, is projected to cost in between $6 million and $7 million. Hornstein hopes the renovations will be completed by August 2016.

Published on October 27, 2015 at 9:09 pm

Contact Hanna: hrhorvat@syr.edu