Shuman: Let me redevelop five downtown buildings

According to developer Alan Shuman, the Reading-owned, 68,000-square-foot brick office tower at Fifth and Penn streets on prime downtown Penn Square property has been sitting vacant for far too long.

So Monday night, Nov. 23, at a City Council meeting – Shuman wants to “stir things up.”

For the second time, the owner and broker of record for Shuman Development Group in Reading will propose the redevelopment of the nine-story Callowhill Building and four adjacent vacant buildings.

After Shuman submitted his original proposal in April 2014, Reading City Council last November instead voted 5-2 to allow Reading retail giant Al Boscov and his nonprofit Our City Reading to redevelop the site. Work was supposed to begin by the end of 2014.

According to Shuman, nothing has yet to be done to the property, except to be used as office space for staff of the soon-to-open DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel Reading, of which Boscov is the prime investor.

An official in the mayor’s office said that work is being done on the properties, on the physical infrastructure inside the building, making it not visible from the outside. Shuman’s plans include transforming a two-story 24,000-square-foot historic bank building into a restaurant and making the Callowhill building into an office tower. He also wants to raze the three remaining condemned buildings to make way for a 25,000-square-foot retail center that includes a rooftop restaurant.

As much of the architecture will be saved from the condemned buildings and will be used in the new construction, Shuman said.

“My hope is to get this project back on track and moving forward,” Shuman said. “I feel it’s important for any big building in the downtown [to] be developed.”

Shuman is projecting that the office tower and bank building will be a combined $8 million project. The retail center will cost $5.5 million, but will be proposed as a City Revitalization and Improvement Zone project, if the city’s reapplication for the CRIZ designation is approved.

The office tower and bank are not considered for CRIZ, Shuman said.