A Fairport developer has purchased the troubled and unfinished CityGate shopping and office plaza on Rochester’s south side.
The buyer is Streamline Real Estate partners, which also owns The Cannery in Fairport. The price tag was $17.25 million.
The sale closed last week, records show, and was first reported by the Rochester Business Journal.
CityGate is home to Costco and Five Star Bank. Each owns its portion of the plaza and are not part of the deal. The remaining property – extending from Westfall Road to the Erie Canal – includes an REI sporting goods store and other, partially vacant commercial space.
The late Anthony Costello owned and developed the site, and it was a jewel of his diverse portfolio of properties.
His vision for CityGate, when first presented back in 2006, was for an urban village complete with apartments, restaurants, offices, even a hotel. Much of that never materialized, and the vision was altered when he landed the Costco big box store, which opened in 2015. Costello died the next year.
The company he left behind, Anthony J. Costello & Son, has been beset by debts and litigation in the years since as family members sorted out his estate. The city cancelled tax breaks for CityGate in 2018, claiming the developer failed to make payments under a a lucrative deal that would have saved the firm millions of dollars over two decades had the entirety of the $177 million plan been completed.
Messages left with a Streamline representative were not immediately returned.
