Inside the cavernous shell of Sibley Square’s fourth floor there is little to indicate what’s to come.
A knee-high barrier is framed out at the top of the blocked escalators. The space is otherwise empty, lit by construction lights strung across the ceiling where caution tape hangs from exposed piping and wires.
But what Ken Greene sees when he stands in this space is much different.
“Very exciting,” he says.
Greene is the point person for developer and building owner WinnCompanies. And he has signed leases for much of this fourth floor, as well as the fifth — 70,000 square feet in total for what will be two of the building’s largest tenants when they move in later this year.
The story of Sibley is remarkable.
Winn has spent or committed more than $160 million to remake a former department store and office building that serves as an anchor on East Main Street. The complex is massive. At 1 million square feet, it is roughly equal to all of what Midtown Plaza was. And it was largely vacant (or about to be) when the Boston-based developer bought the building more than a decade ago.
Today, Greene says he has about 65,000 square feet of leasable space left to market, spread across five of the main building’s six floors. This at a time when remote and hybrid work schedules have led to rising office vacancy nationally. Twenty to 30 percent of office space is empty in downtown Rochester.
“In some ways, we're as surprised as everybody else,” Greene said.
But this didn’t happen by accident.
“We talked about innovation, education, incubation,” Greene said – three words he repeats often as he explains the progression from when Winn bought Sibley for $5 million in 2013.
What’s coming
Design firm SWBR is moving its 100-plus employees from down the street into what was once Sibley’s “Fabulous Fourth” home furnishings floor, and later Monroe Community College. That work is now underway.
Cloud-based communications firm Bandwidth has signed a lease for space on the fifth floor.
There is a beauty school and an environmental engineering firm on the way. Work is well underway converting the building’s old maintenance area and loading docks for use as a bottling research and development facility.
And a new event space called The Duke should open in time for this summer’s jazz festival. Its stage – with East Main as a backdrop – already is booked for 10 days of performances.
“My world is fundamentally as a construction manager today, managing all the different projects,” Greene said.
Some downtown building owners downplay Sibley’s success, arguing they are charging low rents to fill up. Greene says he is getting 20% higher rents on new leases today compared to five years ago. He argues it’s about the extras Sibley can offer – at a time when employees, and thus employers, are demanding more.
“We are competitive and probably more expensive than a lot of the buildings downtown because of all of the amenities, “ he said. “But we are competitive, right?”
Sibley has a 100-seat theater, a dog park, a food court, an on-site small grocery, an attached above-ground parking garage and a police substation in the building.
"And all of those amenities really seem to have touched a nerve and created a synergy here — really, since COVID.”
SWBR president and CEO Thomas Gears said there were other factors as well.
One company’s story
The design firm has spent the past 34 years in the Miller Center, formerly Eastman Place, at East Main and Gibbs streets.
SWBR grew to occupy three floors but now is down to two, “and kind of squeezed,” Gears said. Its landlord is the University of Rochester, which wants to reclaim some of the building and has been encouraging SWBR to consolidate.
“So we knew it was time to start looking, to get back to the space we needed for our people, and to grow,” Gears said.
Sibley offered the chance to do that all on one floor with a lot of natural light, and the company gets to stay in the Center City.
"We're a bunch of designers and planners and engineers,” Gears said. “And our people, overwhelmingly let us know that it was important to stay downtown — within the Inner Loop. That provides us the energy we need to do our creative work.”
Sibley, he said, put them in the middle of it all, and with a conducive mix of neighbors.
"A lot of innovative companies, a lot of startup companies, a lot of creative people,” Gears said.
SWBR’s new space will dispense with cubicles in favor of work cafes, computer labs, huddle areas, quiet rooms and conference spaces. The company has done some work in the building already, with other tenants, and is part of the design team for Bandwidth up on the fifth floor.
Gears said Greene encourages tenants to freely use the building’s other amenities.
“He invites us to treat the building as if it's ours,” Gears said. “So there's lots of breakout spaces, library areas ... a fitness center, and there's that 100-seat meeting room or auditorium as well. So we saw those kinds of spaces that we didn't have to build within our footprint, but we'd have the ability to share.”
Looking ahead
Monroe County approved tax breaks last week for Winn to complete this next phase of the redevelopment — incentives valued at $600,000 for an estimated $7.7 million of work.
“I think we've stretched the imagination about what we really believe mixed use is,” Greene said. “When we think about light manufacturing, retail offices, residential, technology, incubators, the commissary incubator, it really does broaden pretty dramatically what people think about this building being used for”
And change — pretty dramatically — the feel of downtown.
Many offices shifted to remote or hybrid work schedules after COVID, but these new tenants at Sibley – and Constellation Brands’ new headquarters a couple blocks away – promise to bring several hundred workers back to the heart of the Center City.
