Carpet Mills Arts District A Winner in State Awards Round
Westchester & Fairfield County Business Journals
Carpet Mills Arts District a winner in
state awards round
In his antiques-furnished office in his realty company’s Nepperhan Design Center, Randolph Rose rolled out on a carpet a prototype banner for the new Carpet Mills Arts District in Yonkers. The tall, colorful banners will hang along the perimeter of the former Alexander Smith Carpet Mills, the nearly 2 million-square-foot, 19-building industrial complex on Nepperhan Avenue. Rose and several other building owners two years ago joined forces to brand the historic mill complex, once the city’s largest employer, as an arts district that would draw retailers and restaurants and more art-focused tenants to their properties.
The red-brick complex already houses YoHo, a community of artists leasing work lofts at 540 and 578 Nepperhan Ave. YoHo landlord George Huang, co-owner of The Heights Real Estate Co. in Manhattan,spearheaded the arts district project with Rose.
Development officials in Albany indicated they too favored the Yonkers arts district as a revitalization initiative to draw investment, artists, arts-related businesses and tourists to the site.
In the annual round of funding for regional economic development projects, the state agency awarded Rose Realty LLC a grant of up to $500,000. It will help cover owners’ costs this year for the artful banners, exterior lighting and other physical improvements, as well as a study of the site’s decrepit water and sewer infrastructure near the buried Saw Mill River that runs through the property.
Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the complex was also envisioned as a center for new technology in addition to its arts focus in the owners’ application to the state last summer.
Rose’s realty company was the lead applicant for the state grant among 10 mill owners “because I was the forerunner who got this thing started,” he said. Rose with his wife and sons operates two other businesses at 500 Nepperhan Ave., The Randolph Rose Collection Inc., which specializes in custom-designed bronze sculptures, and FEA Home Inc., which restores and sells antiques and ancient works of art found and purchased by Rose and his sons in China, Japan and Southeast Asian countries.
Rose this month is awaiting more details and paperwork on the matching state grant, which will be disbursed as reimbursements for owners’ expenditures to launch the Carpet Mills Arts District. “It may be 1 to 1, it may be 10 to 1,” he said of the funding match.
Rose’s realty company last September closed on its purchase of another carpet mill property, the seven-story, 208,000-square-foot Worsted Building at 179 Saw Mill River Road. Built in the early in the 1900s, the former wool storage warehouse has only a few tenants. “I’m looking to bring in upscale people to upgrade the area,” its new owner said.
Rose said he has turned down bids by a national auto parts retailer and a box factory to lease space in the warehouse building. “I’m very specific,” Rose said, as to the mix of tenants he wants to attract. They include arts, home furnishings, crafts and import-export businesses.
“About 50 years ago they wanted to make that over into an outlet mall,” Rose said of the Worsted Building. An outlet mall featuring well-known furniture manufacturers and related retail businesses “would be ideal for that. I think it’s still viable.”
