A municipal downtown Ithaca parking garage is permanently closed. The City is starting to plan to redevelop the site, which was closed in April and now sits fenced off and vacant.
Ithaca City officials shut down the Seneca Street Parking Garage and adjacent area in downtown Ithaca on April 10 after a piece of concrete dislodged from its third floor and fell to the sidewalk below. Also affected is the popular Seneca at Commons TCAT bus stop, which has since been relocated. More recently, the City announced that the garage won’t reopen.
At fifty-three years, it has surpassed its projected lifespan of around fifty years. Ithaca Mayor Robert Cantelmo said that while plans had been in the works for the end of the aging garage’s lifespan, the structural flaw did accelerate plans.
“The Common Council and I were already in the process of deliberating over what to do with the garage and the parcel with respect to its end-of-life processes. The concrete that fell off of the structure just sort of accelerated that timeline,” Cantelmo said.
What’s next for the site, in a location right at the heart of Ithaca, is still up in the air. “From my personal view, I think it’s really important that we activate that site in a way that is productive and useful to the community, […] and I see that as being a mixed use of some kind,” Cantelmo said. Resident input will be taken into account as well. Cantelmo encourages Ithacans “to write to the Common Council and share their ideas about what type of project might be a good fit for that location.”
TCAT’s Seneca at Commons bus stop became inaccessible as City officials blocked off the sidewalk surrounding the parking garage. The bus stop has been relocated to two temporary locations—most routes now stop at a point further down Seneca Street at the corner of Cayuga Street, while just the Cornell-bound Route Ten has more recently moved to the corner of Tioga and Buffalo Streets following initial congestion at the relocated Seneca Street stop.
The abrupt closure was disruptive to downtown businesses. With less parking spaces, local businesses have felt more strain than they already had as less people decided to come downtown. Moosewood Restaurant couldn’t open their patio because of its proximity to the relocated bus stop, which they say added stress to their finances. Moosewood owner Danica Wilcox, at a previous Common Council meeting, highlighted that having the patio open during Cornell commencement is its “life blood for May after losing money all winter,” as reported in the Ithaca Times, and it is a big loss not to have access to it.
City officials say the redevelopment will be a guided process. Likely, the City, via the Ithaca Urban Renewal Agency, will sell the property to a private firm to redevelop the land and take the reins of the project, while attaching guard rails to ensure the process is in the interest of the public.
“If the Council says we want a site that has parking and commercial and housing, then someone whose bid is responsive to that may be awarded the property,” Cantelmo said, “and at that point they’ll be obligated to deliver on what they promised.” The City has used similar strategies to redevelop properties such as the downtown Marriott hotel and the Green Street Garage.
The Seneca Street Garage project isn’t the only project happening in Ithaca. The City recently accepted a long-awaited ten million dollar Downtown Revitalization Initiative grant from the State, which will connect City government and private developers to jointly build selected projects in a downtown corridor. That process will happen in cooperation with New York State officials throughout the coming years.
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