Adam Meinstein sweeps his arm forward as he speaks of his vision.
A restaurant here. Small-scale manufacturing there. Maybe a rental car office or workshops or a showroom.
We’re standing at 815 Market St., a cavernous building that once was the Keystone branch, Harrisburg’s main postal facility. For decades, millions of letters and parcels passed through, heading into town and out to who-knows-where. It was a noisy place, with the buzz and hum of sorting machines, conveyors and hundreds of employees.
Today, the building is mostly quiet, the silence broken up by an occasional voice or some tools banging. But Meinstein says he’s working hard to fill the building once again with the sound of commerce—people working, people creating, customers being served.
“This is an interesting property,” he said, “We’re sitting in the middle of an industrial zone, but we know there is long-term potential for many uses for the property.”
Meinstein is president of Equilibrium Equities, a suburban Philadelphia investment and development company that bought the facility in 2011 for $600,000, after the U.S. Postal Service wound down 50 years at the site. In addition to the 240,000-square-foot building, 700 parking spaces sit amid an 11-acre property that’s the equivalent of eight city blocks.
After the purchase, Meinstein invested about $1.5 million in improvements that included everything from paving, lights and security cameras outside to removing heavy postal equipment, sealing floors and knocking down walls inside.
The easiest sell was, as one might expect in Harrisburg, the parking. Under the name TransitPark, Meinstein’s company lets spaces on both a short-term and long-term basis at a deep discount to rates charged by Standard Parking, which took over city garages and street parking late last year as part of Harrisburg’s financial recovery plan.
Meinstein now does a lot of business with state and downtown workers who don’t mind walking a few extra blocks, including beneath the Market Street underpass, to save a fair chunk of change. Amtrak riders, downtown residents and short-term visitors represent other groups of customers.
Adam Meinstein
But it’s inside the building where both the opportunities and challenges lie. After the post office closed in 2011, the doors were locked, and the only indication of activity was some new landscaping and a sign that said, “815 Market Street.”
But, says Meinstein, that outward perception was deceptive. Following some improvements and marketing, the building began to find occupants.
Harrisburg-based Exhibit Studios had run out of space at its main facility on Cameron Street, so took some space—and then some more. Restaurant Auction Co. needed a place to stash some equipment, as did Appalachian Brewing Co. Meinstein donated room to store 80 murals that used to line the Mulberry Street Bridge, which is undergoing a complete rehabilitation.
As of this writing, about 80,000 square feet of space was leased, with another 40,000 or so under negotiation, Meinstein said.
Who knew?
“Usually, I like to keep a low profile,” he said.
That, however, began to change in June, when the Papenfuse administration reintroduced a new zoning code that had been moldering on the shelves for four years.
The code rezoned the old post office site from industrial to a new zone called “Downtown Center,” as the city tried to push the boundaries of downtown up Market Street towards Cameron. With the change, industrial uses would not be permitted in the area by right.
“This building went from a single tenant, the U.S. Postal Service, to a living, breathing, mixed-use building, including industrial,” said Meinstein. “The new code takes away industrial use.”
He objected. His building, “grandfathered” in, would be exempt from the restrictions of the new zone as long as the existing uses were unchanged. But he feared negative consequences if a future tenant wanted to propose other industrial uses. The fact that the building was constructed for industrial purposes—with 40 dock doors, 22-foot-high ceilings, a large truck court and massive freight elevators—made that scenario likely, he said.
In fact, he said his building already housed a wide variety of uses, as tenant Exhibit Studios was using it for assembly and fabrication, in addition to storage. Therefore, all these uses should be grandfathered, he insisted.
“We were just trying to make sure that on Wednesday morning, we were allowed to do the same things we were doing on Tuesday night,” he said.
The city disagreed, insisting that the site served primarily as a warehouse.
“We’d have to have a more thorough understanding exactly of what economic activity is going on there, but it’s my understanding that it’s primarily storage or warehousing at this point,” said city Planner/Zoning Officer Geoffrey Knight at a City Council meeting last month.
To try to make changes to the code, Meinstein took a public stance, speaking his piece at several public hearings. He also saw it as an opportune time to let the people of Harrisburg know what had become of their old post office, that he was putting back into productive use an enormous, strategically located building that the federal government no longer wanted.
He received only slight satisfaction. Several City Council members tried, but failed, to pass a narrowly targeted amendment that would have continued to allow a full array of industrial uses at 815 Market by right, including manufacturing, assembly and distribution.
In the end, council agreed only that assembly would be allowed in the new Downtown Center zone—and not by right. The Zoning Hearing Board would have to agree to a special exception for the use.
Still, Meinstein plans to continue trying to change minds by suggesting amendments to the new zoning code during the six-month review period. Otherwise, he’ll operate on the belief that the building’s historic industrial uses—including warehouse, distribution and assembly/fabrication—are grandfathered uses for his building.
“We’re going to continue doing what we’re doing,” he said.
In his view, the city’s stance represents wishful thinking. The administration and council may want to extend downtown to Cameron Street, but there’s currently no demand for new offices or housing there—and may not be for many years, he said. What is there demand for? The industrial uses that his building was designed for.
“It was not a great message for the business community at large that these uses did not just get clearly approved in a highly functional, well-maintained industrial building,” he said.
In fact, 815 Market is one of the few decent structures left in a corridor that once housed thriving industrial concerns as diverse as a brewery, a print shop and the Patriot-News press and distribution facilities. Abandoned buildings and large surface lots now dominate the area between the railroad tracks and Cameron Street.
“Look around here,” he said, gesturing into the distance towards Market Street. “What do you see? There are vacant buildings, distressed properties. That one building has trees growing out of the roof.”
Then he pointed back to his building.
“This property has long-term potential,” he said. “We have a lot of room to do what we need to do, what the city needs to have happen.”
