A ruling by the New York State Supreme Court has cleared the way to demolish Albany‘s Central Warehouse, a historic refrigerated warehouse in the city’s North Albany railroad district, according to a report from WAMC.
The 11-story building was built in 1927 by the New York Central Railroad and includes a two track spur entering the second floor; the walls are three-foot-thick concrete. The refrigeration systems used potentially toxic ammonia.
The building is located at Colonie and Montgomery Streets, not far from the filled-in Lock 1 of the Erie Canal, the site of the weighmaster’s office at the north end of the Albany Basin, abandoned in 1917.
It was a state of the art facility when it was constructed. The fireproof steel and concrete “Central Terminal Warehouse” required 750,000 board feet of lumber used in construction, mostly as forms.
Although the cold storage industry had been around since the 1870s, electrically operated cold storage was relatively new.
The building marked an expansion of railroads operating central warehouses directly, and was considered a threat to the 462 different independent public cold storage operators in the United States.
Initially cold storage operators owned the goods they stored and found their own customers, but by the time of the 20th century the goods were almost entirely owned by dealers to supply their regular trade.
“Cold storage is a benefit to all mankind in that it allows of a greater variety of food during all seasons of the year,” declared Madison Cooper’s 1914 Practical Cold Storage.
“Health and longevity are promoted by the free consumption of fruits and the placing of fresh fruits at the disposal of even the poorest of our citizens during every month in the year will certainly result in a wholesale benefit to mankind so far reaching in its effects as to be incalculable,” according to Cooper.
The Albany building had a total capacity of 3.3 million cubic feet – including 350,00 cubic feet of cold storage. One of first shipments into the warehouse was twenty railroad car loads of Maine potatoes.
The Central Terminal Warehouse at one time employed 350 workers. During the Great Depression it was used to distribute food to the poor.
In 1969 Connecticut Cold Storage bought all Central Warehouse stock. They ran the warehouse until the New York State Teachers Retirement System foreclosed on their mortgage in 1978. Developer Richard Gerrity acquired the property from the Retirement System in 1980.
At that time, about 30 full-time workers were employed there and the building had a 65 percent occupancy rate. During the Regan years it began to used as a billboard. It was abandon in the early 1990s.
It has gone through several owners since then, including Frank Crisafulli, a retired owner of a food distribution company who bought the building for $1 and $120 in back taxes and sold it shortly after for $500,000.
In 1996, the building was found to have 18 inches of ice built up on some floors. The ammonia was subsequently drained from the system. On October 22, 2010, a fire began in the warehouse and lasted for days.
The City of Albany declared a state of emergency on July 29, 2022 after chunks of the building began to fall near the Amtrak tracks below. The line is used for all trains over the Hudson River on the Livingston Avenue Bridge; travel through Albany and west was temporarily halted.
In October 2022, longtime owner Evan Blum lost control of the property after a judge ruled in favor of foreclosure. The building is now under the management of Albany County.
Illustrations, from above: Albany Central Warehouse with Interstate 787 and the Hudson River in the rear as seen from the Empire State Plaza’s Corning Tower, 2011 (courtesy Wikimedia user Andy Arthur); New York Central Railroad spur entrance and chunks of concrete that fell from Central Warehouse along the east-west Amtrak track, 2022 (Will Waldron, Times Union photo); and Central Terminal Warehouse under construction, May 31, 1938 (Albany Times Union, from an Albany Lumber & Planing Company advertisement).
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