One of the grand old buildings in Hamilton’s downtown core is about to get a new lease on life, thanks to a local non-profit group and a Toronto development company.
The Coppley Building on York Boulevard was most recently home to an upscale men’s clothier but will soon be transformed into a community hub with a mix of charities, institutions and private sector tenants – all while maintaining its original facade and character.
Restoration and renovation work on the 165-year-old building is expected to begin next year, with new tenants moving in sometime in mid-2023.
Mazyar Mortazavi, president and CEO of TAS – the company developing the project – told Global News Radio’s Good Morning Hamilton that a project like this doesn’t come along every day.
“For us to be able to partner with the Hamilton Community Foundation and bring back an extraordinary building to sort of its iteration for the next century is a really great opportunity,” said Mortazavi. “The Coppley is a magnificent building and for us, we see the opportunity to turn this into a really important community asset hub.”
Terry Cooke of the Hamilton Community Foundation (HCF), which will be an anchor tenant in the building, said he’s hopeful it will be home to a wide variety of local organizations and businesses.
“I think it reimagines our most important pre-Confederation commercial building,” said Cooke. “It’ll be an eclectic mix of charities, non-profits, institutions and private sector tenants – hopefully, some commercial stuff, coffee shops, bakeries, what have you.
“We think that it is just going to add some additional momentum to all of the great activity that’s already happening in and around our core.”
Mortazavi said the goal in renovating the Coppley will be to respect its historic architecture and character while updating its infrastructure to ensure it operates in an environmentally friendly way.
“It’s a very handsome building on the outside and the building is full of character on the inside, and it really does this reimagining of how we can leverage old in terms of built form to inspire new.”
It’s also being looked at as a way of driving positive change in the downtown core by offering subsidized below-market rents to some tenants and developing new models that will help some tenants build equity and participate in the value the project generates.
“Developers are seen as catalysts for gentrification and gentrification often creates displacement, and we see the opportunity to reverse that plague, where development and community engagement can help to re-anchor and re-empower the communities that are there and to create something really extraordinary out of something that was extraordinary.”
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