Slap some paint on that ugly warehouse

ALBANY — A reader left me an angry voicemail. This time, at least, I was not the source of the ire.

The man who called last week was mad about the Central Warehouse — the big, hulking, peeling and brutally ugly building just north of downtown Albany. He demanded to know why Gov. Andrew Cuomo hadn’t done something about it.

“How can the state of New York allow this monstrosity in its capital city?” he asked without leaving his name or number.

I enjoy blaming Cuomo for things as much as the next guy, but I’ll give him a pass on this one. The Central Warehouse was a hideous blight before Cuomo took office, and it seems likely to remain that way long after the governor has gone to work for President Mike Bloomberg.

Still, I do understand the caller’s frustration. Anybody who cares about Albany should want to see changes at a warehouse that is as visible as any landmark on the skyline.

The Big Ugly, as I like to call the warehouse, is both big and ugly, a decaying ruin built on a monumental scale.

The 11-story building on Montgomery Street is owned by Evan Blum. In 2017, Blum purchased the warehouse for $1 and vowed to transform it into an arts hub that would also accommodate aspects of his downstate architectural salvage business.

No progress has been evident since, but Blum on Monday insisted he’s moving forward with “special plans” that will be “very fruitful.” He declined to provide specifics, but did ask for patience and a little less carping from the Capital Region’s press and citizenry.

“We’re just getting our ducks in a row so we can move forward,” Blum told me. “It’s more complicated than anybody can know, but I’m not giving up.”

Well, good to know. Certainly, a 500,000-square-foot warehouse built in the 1920s for cold storage is an unusually difficult piece of real estate with which to wrestle. On that, we can all agree.

But I’ll remind Blum that owning a building as visible as The Big Ugly is naturally going to entail public scrutiny and interest. If you couldn’t suffer the heat of this particular kitchen, you shouldn’t have purchased it.

My caller isn’t alone with his impatience. I get exasperated calls and emails about The Big Ugly fairly often. And recently, the Altamont Enterprise published a passionate call for a #KnockItDown campaign that would fund a warehouse demo likely to cost millions.

“There’s nothing to be redeemed from this irredeemable property,” Jesse Sommer wrote, adding that “the Central Warehouse has no retrofitted future.”

Sommer ignored an important point. Though Blum owes back taxes on the building, much of which accumulated before he took ownership, The Big Ugly is private property. To raze the warehouse at this moment, Albany likely would have to seize it by eminent domain in a costly legal battle.

Meanwhile, is The Big Ugly really irredeemable?

I say no. It would take nothing more than a mural to turn this lemon into lemonade.

Here’s an idea: Turn one side of the warehouse into an Albany version of Mount Rushmore, with a mural of the four New York governors who went on to the presidency. In case you’re wondering, that’s Martin Van Buren, Grover Cleveland, Teddy Roosevelt, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

(To secure state funding for the project, we might need to squeeze Mario Cuomo’s visage in somewhere.)

Other sides of the building could be painted to celebrate the Adirondacks, say, or the “eggcellence” of life in Albany. With that, the warehouse would become an entirely different symbol of the city, one indicating progress and creativity instead of stagnation and decay.

“It would be the best facelift the city could get,” said Kevin Clark, a Niskayuna-based artist who painted the massive new mural on the Hedley Building in Troy. “Even just a base coat on the building would be wonderful.”

Clark said the Central Warehouse gnaws at him every time he drives by, so badly does he itch for a chance to paint it. What a canvass! With Interstate 787 streaming by — at least until Cuomo gets around to removing the highway — it couldn’t be more visible.

The hardest part, Clark said, would be the prep work — the scraping and priming that, by his guess, could cost nearly $1 million. (For perspective, the Albany Skyway project, which will turn a highway ramp near the warehouse into a pedestrian walkway, is expected to cost $15 million.)

But again, The Big Ugly is private property. So I asked Blum for his thoughts on murals for the warehouse, which led him to reveal that he has “good plans for the exterior.”

And what might they entail? “You’ll see when it happens,” Blum said.

I won’t hold my breath.

[email protected] ■ 518-454-5442 ■ @chris_churchill