If there’s one thing that residents of rural towns can usually agree on, it’s that old empty buildings are likely to remain just that. In Pine Hill, an Ulster County hamlet with a population of just under 300 five minutes from Belleayre Mountain, a group of residents have banded together to save a blighted historic building from that same fate. The Wellington, a planned adaptive reuse development with 10 units of affordable housing with a cafe and food market on the ground floor, is well on its way to becoming a source of community pride once again.
Located in a prominent position on Pine Hill’s Main Street, the three-story, 11,000-square-foot Italianate was built in 1882 as a hotel during a boomtime of Catskills tourism. In 2002, the property was added to the National Registry of Historic Places. In 2010, it became part of Pine Hill’s Historic District, which encompasses all of Main Street and Pine Hill's central business district. By the time the building went on the market in 2022, however, it was in a serious state of disrepair.
“Every time you walk anywhere on Main Street, you see this huge hotel with a cupola that looks over the entire village. The yard was just filled with stuff and the building was starting to fall down. It was a very sad kind of profile for a historic district,” says Jan Jaffe, board president of Wellington Blueberry LLC, which now owns the building.
Organizing a Community
When the building went up for sale, several Pine Hill residents began talking about the potential for purchasing it, but the amount of renovation work was too daunting for anyone to take on by themselves. “We were all just whinging a bit, asking ‘What’s going to happen?’” says Gigi Loizzo, a Wellington Blueberry board member and co-owner of the Belleayre Lodge in Pine Hill.
“I said why don’t we have a meeting to see who is interested?” she recalls. “We sent out an invite to as many emails as we had for community members and 20 to 25 people showed up at the lodge just to hear what was happening.”
Soon after that meeting, 20 residents committed to investing at least $5,000 each in the purchase of the property. Together, they and a few other community members who chipped in $1,000 each raised almost $500 thousand. The investors range in age from 30 to 74 years old and from lifelong Pine Hill residents to part- and full-timers who have been there for decades to Covid-era newcomers.
Katya Blitzman, a Wellington Blueberry board member and data analyst, had been attracted to the idea of renovating the building since she moved to the hamlet in 2021. “Pine Hill just has so much potential and it's not quite living up to that potential yet,” she says. “I really think turning one or two key buildings around and bringing new life back to them will change the whole town.”
After the building’s purchase, the group hit the ground running. They hosted two community clean up days, filling 30 dumpsters with decades’ worth of trash. They hired a preservation architecture firm based in Albany to start on initial drawings and renovation estimates. They began discussing plans for the building’s use that could address pressing needs in Pine Hill and their wider community in the town of Shandaken, a food desert that lacks access to fresh food and which needs housing options that can help middle and low-income residents stay in the area in a time of unprecedented housing cost inflation. They also began talking with RUPCO, the Kingston-based affordable housing development nonprofit about what it would take to renovate the building and turn it into affordable housing.
Then, all the pieces began to fall into place. As part of the work of Shandaken’s downtown revitalization project PH2, as well as the town’s newly formed Housing Smart Committee, volunteer residents including Wellington Blueberry members began inviting county and state elected officials to visit the town’s two commercial hamlets, Pine Hill and Phoenicia, to see areas of need for additional government resources.
“One of the things we said to state and county officials is that we're like a border town up here. We’re on the border of Delaware County. We’re on the border of the Regional Economic Development Council [which serves seven counties]. We're 45 minutes to an hour from Kingston. It's very easy to forget that there isn't just scenery here. There are people who live here,” Jaffe says. “They were really kind of impressed by all the things that were going on here that were very much powered by volunteers and local spirit.”
The Wellington Gains Momentum
This spring, RUPCO officially came on board as Wellington Blueberry’s development partner. With the organization’s founding mission as a rural development corporation, RUPCO CEO Kevin O’Connor says that they were compelled to find a way to help due to the amount of effort the Wellington team had put into the project.
Going forward, RUPCO will continue to help Wellington Blueberry apply for state and federal funding opportunities to reach their $6 million goal, and act as the construction company for the project.
Thanks to the work that the town of Shandaken put into receiving attention from elected officials, when the Ulster County Office of Economic of Development began work to submit applications for the state’s Restore New York grant this spring, they knew of a project in Pine Hill that fit the bill.
Earlier this month, it was announced that Wellington Blueberry has been awarded $1.6 million from the Restore New York grant for its restoration and adaptive reuse as a mixed-use development with a cafe and food market on the ground floor. Its 10 studio and one-bedroom apartments will be classified as workforce housing, which will be available to rent for people working in the area with incomes equal or less than 80 percent of the area median income.
“I am so impressed by—and thankful for—the boundless energy and hard work that Jan and the Wellington Blueberry LLC team bring to everything they do in Pine Hill," says Ulster County Executive Jen Metzger. "These community members have been involved in so much, from working to keep the farmers' market open year-round to helping seniors with transportation issues and starting a Housing Smart Committee, and they are truly the 'Little Engine that can' when it comes to their vision for restoring the historic Wellington Hotel and transforming it into a community anchor that includes much needed housing. I’m deeply appreciative of their efforts, and I’m glad the County has been able to assist in getting state support for this worthy project.”
According to Jaffe, the LLC would love to see the Wellington’s doors open by the end of 2026. It’s an ambitious goal, but one that matches the commitment to rural revitalization that the volunteer group of residents has been guided by in the last two years.
“One of the things that people in PH2 say is that Shandaken is independent by nature,” says Jaffe. “That's sort of our natural way of being while also recognizing that we're in a very special place in nature and wanting to preserve as much of it as possible—both the natural environment and the built environment. And I think when people see someone trying to make that happen, they connect with it. They say, ‘Yes, this is what we're about.’”
