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Message: [QUOTE="KellySyracuse, post: 4732670, member: 1644"] Subscriber exclusive, I posted the details [URL unfurl="true"]https://www.syracuse.com/business/2023/08/syracuses-snowdon-apartments-sold-for-3m.html[/URL] "Syracuse, N.Y. -- The Snowdon Apartments, which started out more than 100 years ago as a luxury apartment house but later became one of Syracuse’s most infamous welfare hotels, has changed owners for the first time in half a century. A deed filed with the Onondaga County Clerk’s Office shows that a limited liability company bought the six-story, 179-unit apartment building at 422 James St. for $3.4 million on Aug. 3. The company, 422 James Street LLC, bought the building from the family of the late Russell Phelps, of Binghamton. Public records show the limited liability company was formed on March 14, with its registered agent listed as Juan Contreras and its principal address in the city of Mount Vernon in Westchester County. Phelps bought the building in 1975. He [URL='https://www.pressconnects.com/obituaries/bps137561']died at age 105[/URL] on Feb. 25. Greg Loh, chief policy officer for Mayor Ben Walsh, said Friday that city officials have had no contact with the new owner and have no information on what the buyer’s plans are for the building. Designed by famed Syracuse architect Archimedes Russell and built at the entrance to lower James Street from downtown, the building is named after its first owner, Walter Snowdon Smith. It originally was a high-end apartment building for the well-to-do, with only a few rooms on each floor. But by the 1960s, the building fell victim to urban decline and turned into a hotel for transients. By the 1970s, it had turned back into an apartment building, this time for indigent tenants, convicted sex offenders and mental health outpatients. Its once spacious rooms had been cut up into nearly 200 units, with the residents of each of its six floors sharing a common bathroom at the end of the hallway. Crime, including stabbings and shootings, became common at the Snowdon. So were fire calls. In a 10-month span in 1988, firefighters were called to the building 164 times, mostly for false alarms but occasionally for real fires. Still, hints of the building’s early days remain -- original tin ceilings in a first-floor corridor, hand-plastered walls, and “S” embedded in the floor of the lobby." [/QUOTE]

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