Historic Coppley Building in Downtown Hamilton to Transform to Community Center – Hamilton | The Canadian News

One of the great old buildings in downtown Hamilton is about to take on new life, thanks to a local nonprofit group and Toronto development company.

The Coppley Building on York Boulevard was the most recent home to a luxury men’s tailor, but will soon be transformed into a community center 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 the new tenants moving in sometime in mid-2023.

Mazyar Mortazavi, president and CEO of TAS, the company developing the project, told Global News Radio Good morning hamilton that a project like this does not arrive every day.

“For us to be able to partner with the Hamilton Community Foundation and bring back an extraordinary building for its iteration for the next century is a great opportunity,” said Mortazavi. “The Coppley is a great building and for us, we see an opportunity to make it a really important community asset center.”

Terry Cooke of the Hamilton Community Foundation (HCF), who will be an anchor tenant in the building, said he hopes it will be home to a wide variety of local businesses and organizations.

“I think it reinvents our most important commercial building before the Confederacy,” Cooke said. “It will be an eclectic mix of charities, nonprofits, institutions and private sector tenants, hopefully some commercial stuff, coffee shops, bakeries, whatever.

“We think it will just add additional momentum to all the great activity that is already happening in and around our core.”

Mortazavi said the goal of renovating the Coppley will be to respect its historic architecture and character while updating its infrastructure to ensure it operates in an environmentally friendly manner.

“It’s a very beautiful building on the outside and the building is full of character on the inside, and it really does this reinvention of how we can harness the old in terms of built form to inspire the new.”

It is also being considered as a way to drive positive change in the city center by offering subsidized below-market rents to some tenants and developing new models that will help some tenants generate capital and participate in the value that the project generates. .

“Developers are seen as catalysts for gentrification and gentrification often creates displacement, and we see an opportunity to reverse that plague, where development and community engagement can help re-anchor and empower the communities that are there. and to create something truly extraordinary. of something that was extraordinary. “

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