TRENTON – A long-abandoned city schoolhouse is getting a facelift.
Council voted 7-0 Thursday night to pass an ordinance officially designating KCG Development as redeveloper of the William G. Cook School at 40 Culyer Avenue.
The company plans to transform the city-owned, 109-year-old former schoolhouse into one- and two-bedroom apartment lofts, featuring a lounge and fitness center, according to the ordinance.
KCG Development will pay $124,000 for the property, built in 1910.
Mayor Reed Gusciora credited the council for “doing the right thing.”
“It’s going to be an exciting game-changer for the Wilbur section,” he said.
The school closed decades ago and has alternately been occupied before being completely abandoned.
Over the years, it has fallen into disrepair, with part of the roof caving in, Gusciora said.
Members of the mayor’s inner circle believed there was no salvaging the building and advised demolishing it.
In the end, the city found a company that was willing to “gut” and restore the building.
The deal with KCG Development was in the works for some time.
Over the summer, a group of volunteers worked with the city to clean up the property, which was with weeds and filled with trash and debris.
The mayor toured the building last year with developers.
The building was appraised, the mayor said, city officials met multiple times with KCG representatives and talked to residents in the neighborhood about their hopes for the Cook School.
The ordinance was introduced for a first reading earlier this month and passed Thursday with little discussion.
East Ward councilman Joe Harrison thanked his colleagues for passing the deal after they scuttled another redevelopment plan this month, that one involving Princetel, which hoped torehab a dilapidated, trash-filled stretch of the Roebling complex.
“I made a promise before the election that I was going to clean it up. We did,” Harrison said of the Cook School. “We sent an engineer out there for the building to be seen.”
The Princetel deal died over council’s demand for another appraisal and concerns that the administration hadn’t fulfilled all the legal requirements before forcefully pushing to get the deal done ahead of a deadline for the company to apply for state tax credits to aid renovation.
Gusciora said he couldn’t identify any material differences in how the city pursued the Cook School and Princetel deals.
In hindsight, the mayor said he erred by trying to pull off the “big kahuna” Princetel deal first and by not asking “more probing questions” to understand the council’s position on the fiber optic company’s proposal.
“We have about eight pokes in the fire for development,” he said. “I started with the big kahuna. Maybe I should have started with the smaller ones. At the end of the day, they [the council] are the redevelopment authority. We’re the ones who do all the research.”
Gusciora said the administration and the council “tried to work a lot closer” on the Cook School deal.
Representatives from KCG didn’t respond to a message seeking comment Friday.
But Joel Silver, the vice president of development at KCG, which has refurbished old buildings into apartments in cities around the U.S., told Jersey Digs in an interview the company planned to turn the Cook School into 29 mixed-income apartments, part of a larger project to build a 28-unit building called the Clinton Lofts.
The company will apply for low-income housing tax credits, Silver told the outlet, and hopes the state applies historic tax credits to the project.
After clearing the first hurdle, the Cook project must go before the city planning board for approval.
There’s no definitive timeline for when work will begin on the project, but the mayor said he was told KCG officials hope to complete it within 18 months “if it’s greenlighted.”
The mayor added the company wants toretain much of the building’s historic integrity.
“We’re trying to roll out the red carpet and streamline the process,” Gusciora said.
Editor’s Note: This story has been updated with additional comments from the mayor
