The long-shuttered Western branch YMCA in southwest Detroit near Clark Park has a new owner with plans to redevelop the late 1920s building into apartments, offices and "community-oriented" space.
Ryan Zampardo and Devon Caldwell, principals of Detroit-based development firm Inkwell Partners, said in an Aug. 26 interview that they purchased the old five-story red brick Y earlier this summer. The 90,000-square-foot building has sat vacant since the YMCA of Metropolitan Detroit sold it in 2000 to prominent Detroit landlord Dennis Kefallinos.
In addition to standard YMCA amenities such as a swimming pool and basketball courts, the old building had dozens of small dormitory-style rooms and separate entrances for men and boys. Zampardo said the rooms could
be combined to create some 30 to 50 modern apartments, depending on how much office space is in the redesign.
"Our hope is that we can ultimately get a user in the lower floors who will activate a community-oriented fitness and child care," Zampardo said, "with, hopefully, some combination of apartments and office space on the upper floors.”
The developers said it is too early to give any timeline for the redevelopment, but they do expect the project to need a few years for pre-construction planning, given its complexity.
"We want to give this the time to do it right and find the right mix of uses, and the right design and the right equation of historic rehab specialists," Caldwell said. “So it’s probably going to be a bit slower than our average project.”
Inkwell Partners has undertaken about 20 development and redevelopment projects in Detroit since 2017, many of them historic rehabs of residential buildings.
“A lot of our work takes place in Hubbard Farms and southwest Detroit, so this is a building we knew well," Zampardo said. “Thankfully this one was built really well back in the day. A lot of concrete, a lot of brick. It’s still standing — despite not having occupants for a number of decades.”
The sale of the old Y was first reported by Crain's Detroit. The developers said the sale price was for $1.1 million. Land records show Kefallinos bought the building for $500,000 in late 2000.
The YMCA association had considered selling the building in early 2000 to the Detroit Rescue Mission, which wanted it as a rehabilitation center for substance abusers and a shelter for homeless people, but ditched those plans after pushback from neighborhood residents.
Prior to the 2000 sale, the Michigan Department of Corrections had been leasing part of the building as a halfway house.
Contact JC Reindl: 313-378-5460 or jcreindl@freepress.com. Follow him on X @jcreindl.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Developers have ambitious plans for abandoned YMCA building in Detroit
