The once-elegant 19th century building on Third Street that has stood vacant and dilapidated for several years is about to change hands.
Shelter Island builder James Olinkiewicz is purchasing the historic building and plans to “restore it to its former glory.”
Olinkiewicz told SoutholdLOCAL he would be closing on the purchase by the end of next week. He has already begun to make emergency repairs.
“My mission is to work on the exterior right now, to make sure it is structurally sound,” Olinkiewicz said in a phone interview yesterday. “It has been let go for so long.” It was once occupied by the popular Meson Olé restaurant.
“My immediate plan is to get the outside of the building cleaned up so it looks decent, repair the roof, paint, replace the railings. Then I will try to figure out where to go from there.”
The direction he takes, he said, will depend in large part on what village officials want to see there.
Olinkiewicz said he has no intention of renovating the building for use as a hotel. A restaurant and/or shops on the ground floor are a natural and he thinks the upper floors should be residential units for year-round local residents. Year-round rentals are in scarce supply, said Olinkiewicz, who owns rental properties throughout the village. He’s got a waiting list of at least 50 people, he said.
“It’s great that he’s not looking to tear it down,” said Greenport Village Mayor George Hubbard. “I haven’t seen his plans but for restaurant and shops with apartments, it sounds like the same thing [that was there] so he’d just need to get a use evaluation from the planning board,” Hubbard said.
The building “has been an eyesore a while now,” the mayor said. “It’s been very run down.”
A year ago, the village brought a legal action in State Supreme Court to “remedy the emergency hazardous conditions” at the site. Village officials even discussed using its power of eminent domain to condemn the property and possibly raze it to make way for a YMCA.
“It’s a historically significant building,” Olinkiewicz said, “and deserves to be restored.”
The building has a rich past. Built in 1894 and owned by F.B. Thornhill and G.P. Salmon, it was once the Burr Hotel and later the Sterlington Hotel, according to the Southold Historical Society.
“It was very nice in the ‘70s ‘80s,” the mayor said yesterday. The way it fell into disrepair is “a shame,” he said. “That he want’s to keep the character of the building is a real plus for the village.”
