Developer Paul Denz has expanded his downtown holdings with a pending purchase of the iconic 18-story First Niagara (formerly “New Haven Savings” and then “NewAlliance”) office tower across from the Green at Elm and Church Streets.
Denz said in an interview Tuesday that he has signed a contract and put down a deposit for his Northside Development Co. to buy the building from First Niagara for $18.25 million.
The Buffalo-based bank, which has been downsizing, will have a lease to remain in its first-floor branch space as well as three floors above it for ten years. But it’s abandoning the fourth, fifth and sixth floors, Denz said.
He said he plans to keep 195 Church an office building. The former New Haven Savings Bank constructed the 210,369-square-foot tower in 1974. First Niagara put it on the market in December.
“I think the rental market is good for office right now,” Denz said. “There are tenants expressing interest already.”
Denz is already a major player in downtown real estate. At the other end of the long block, at the corner of Church and Chapel, he owns the Exchange Building at 123 – 127 Church; he bought it for $2.7 million in October 2013. Another bank, Santander, abandoned the storefront branch there in July. But a company called Square Nine has moved into 30,000 square feet of the building. (A previous state-aided effort to move the Hamden-based CRN company there fell through.) Denz said he’s “talking to a couple of commercial tenants now” for the Santander space, though he doesn’t yet have commitments.
“It used to be that everybody went to a branch to do banking. Now everybody does banking online,” Denz observed. “So the branches have gone from 7,000 to 8,000 square down to 2- to 3,000 square feet. That’s the new model for a branch.”
Around the corner, at Orange and Chapel, Denz owns a building that was torn down after it started collapsing last month. He has a memorandum of understanding with the city to construct a new five-story, 50,000 square-foot building there and an on adjoining lot, with apartments above 10,000 square feet of ground-floor retail. Denz said his company is in the process of preparing architectural drawings to submit to the city for approval.
Denz also owns a lot in the middle of that Chapel block between Church and Chapel, where a building burned down in December 2007. He said plans for that mid-block lot are on hold. “That’s a bigger project. I’ve got to see what happens with all the projects on the board,” he said.
This guy is buying new properties while planning to indefinitely ignore his giant vacant crater between Chapel and Crown in the heart of downtown. He preserves his option of watching the market and building in the indefinite future, in the meantime greatly harming the city.
His vacant properties are blighted. They should be taken by eminent domain and then sold to active developers. If folks are willing to develop "Hill-to-Downtown" properties, then they are surely willing to develop what Denz will or cannot.