A Movement is Underway to Uplift Slavic Village's Main Street. Will Vacant Property Owners Buy In?

Fleet Avenue is set to reborn against with millions of ARPA dollars still waiting to be spent. Credit: Mark Oprea

A stroll down Fleet Ave in Slavic Village will greet you with two dozen or so businesses and storefronts.

There’s the Lincoln Post—a bar home of the Polish Legion of American Veterans—off East 61st. There’s Stys Inc., off 59th, where one can get both used paint racks and forklifts. Or Bert’s & Son, hawking auto parts and machine wear on 53rd.

But there are large stretches that don’t feel bustling. More than half of those sleepy storefronts in ten blocks, a 2022 study by Slavic Village Development confirmed, are either vacant or simply used as storage.

It’s a fact of life in the neighborhood that’s led to a tough grey area for gung ho politicians and community development organizations eager to see Slavic Village’s Main Street pumped back to life. A lot of that restoration will lie in convincing property owners to renovate, lease, or sell.

“It’s not just about saying, ‘Oh, let’s incentivize and get people to do these things,’ because a lot of folks really don’t want to do that work,” Shneur Kushner, Slavic Village’s director of development, told Scene on a recent walk down Fleet.

“They’re just here waiting for a paycheck,” he added. “We call them speculative landowners. It’s easier for them to just sit on the property, hoping that someone else will do the work—and they’ll be able to sell theirs and make money.”

These speculative landowners (colloquially: “sitters”) are at the heart of Kushner’s work, as he and other CDC workers in Ward 12 prepare to decide how to properly dole out $2 million of American Rescue Plan Act funding.

The idea to use it to breathe new life into a desolate Fleet Avenue, along with streets in Old Brooklyn and Brooklyn Center, belongs in part to Ward 12 Councilwoman Rebecca Maurer, who opted to dedicate an entire week, starting Monday, to shedding light on both the strategy and implications of those federal dollars being spent on bringing back Main Street quality to a corridor that has anything but.

On Tuesday, Maurer led a procession of business owners, CDC workers and intrigued locals up and down Fleet Avenue, in an attempt to fact-find and present Fleet as it is—with its blank facades, its run-down churches, its strewn furniture and deflated balloons. First-floor spaces, we saw, could be home to new boutiques and businesses, like the Philomena Bake Shop off West 54th.

Yet, Maurer’s reach can only go so far. Property owners on Fleet can get up to $200,000 of matched grants from this ARPA payout. And City Hall, under Council’s watch, will do what it will to fine those with buildings not up to code. (A lot of them on Fleet.)

In other words: Bringing a horse to water is one thing; making her drink is another.

Some owners think they’re “going to retire when they sell a property that is now in the ‘new Tremont’ for a million dollars,” Maurer told Scene while crossing East 54th on Tuesday. “And instead they are dragging down the city and the neighborhood along with them, all because they refuse to invest in their properties.”

Ward 12 Councilwoman Rebecca Maurer led about a dozen stakeholders down Fleet on Tuesday in an effort to see how exactly the street could be redone with millions of ARPA dollars. Credit: Mark Oprea

Trash and carelessness from “land speculators” are top complaints. Supermarket manager Matthew Patel said he laments those who litter. “I have eighty percent good neighbors around me,” Patel said. “Twenty percent are bad.” Credit: Mark Oprea

Tension between the American private and public realms rises to the surface anytime outside dollars dare to revive retail areas that once thrived.

One sees it in Shaker Square, where Cleveland Neighborhood Progress is betting $4.5 million in renovations—in paint, new roofing, new elevators—that the shopping hub can be revitalized for a post-pandemic shopper. Or, nearly a decade ago, in a Euclid Avenue altered, for better or worse depending on whom you talk to, by the installation of the RTA Healthline.

And it almost happened to Fleet back in 2017, when the street itself was repaved, bike lanes were painted, and filtration water basins were installed along the street to catch all of the road’s water runoff.

But those who marched curiously down Fleet with Maurer on Tuesday seemed to be convinced that the corridor they walked down is fit to be next. For real this time around.

That energy is what convinced Josh Maxwell and Brendan Trewella, directors of Small Organization Solutions, to move their offices to the second floor of a now vacant Polish café. And of course new work. The two are at work on a master plan of the street, which will, Maxwell said, be a complete detail of “who lives on the street, who works on the street, who walks up and down the street.”

And pry into the inner reasoning (of lack thereof) of the so-called sitters.

“We just want to know: ‘What’s important to you? Why are you holding onto this property?'” Maxwell told Scene. ‘”How can we help you figure out a solution to this end that helps you and the neighborhood?'”

For businesses actually working and operating on Fleet, any confidence in Maurer’s plan rested, Scene found, in simple crime watch or ongoing cleanup.

“This area needs to be cleaned-up nicely—people keep throwing trash everywhere! I can’t understand their nonsense,” Matthew Patel, the manager of the Slavic Village Market off East 64th, told Scene as he operated his cash register. “But I would say I have 80% good neighbors around me; 20% are bad.”

It was the latter that convinced Marie Kouassi, the owner of Braided Beauty, to relocate a few years ago to a storefront on Lee Road in Cleveland Heights.

“It was a bad area,” she told Scene. “Someone broke in. And that was it.”