The City has hung the for sale sign on one of downtown’s most beautiful buildings. The landmark Market Arcade at 617 Main Street has a $1.8 million asking price. The 76,000 sq.ft. complex is made up of three buildings anchored by the three-story atrium that connects Main and Washington Streets. There are a mix of office, retail, restaurant, cultural and service tenants in the complex.
The Buffalo News has the details:
Brendan Mehaffy, director of the city’s Office of Strategic Planning, said the city decided to sell the building after several developers – both well-known and less prominent – recently approached Mayor Byron W. Brown, Mehaffy and others in the city administration about purchasing it. The city’s Cars Sharing Main Street project to restore two-way vehicle traffic to the thoroughfare outside the Market Arcade’s front entrance has also contributed to excitement around the building, he said.
“It’s time,” Mehaffy said. “There’s a lot of activity that’s happening downtown and several folks expressed interest in the building, so it’s time to list it.”
Mehaffy said the city hasn’t discussed detailed prices with anyone yet, but is “open to the offers that we’re receiving from folks at this point.”
“I wouldn’t expect that this is something that would be on the market for a while,” he said. “Because of the interest in downtown and the improvements on Main Street, there’s just been a lot of interest, not just in this property but all of the properties on Main Street at this point.”
Completed in 1892 and design by Edward B. Green and William S. Wicks, the Market Arcade is the city’s only historic covered shopping arcade. Matching elevations on Main and Washington retail much of their original Neo-Classical architectural elements. The facades are tan-colored Roman bricks and most of the ornamentation is terra cotta.
The Market Arcade, like much of the Theater District in the late 1970’s and much of the 1980’s, was vacant and decrepit. Consentino brothers’ Dynamic Enterprise Inc. started renovating the three buildings in the late 1980’s after building the hotel at the corner of Main and Chippewa Street. That work stalled and eventually the City completed the work in 1995 at a cost of approximately $10 million.