Renovating Vandergrift's vacant J.C. Penney building takes step forward

The Vandergrift Improvement Program is beginning to make progress on renovating the town’s historic J.C. Penney building at 134 Grant Ave. after years of saving and struggle.

The building has sat vacant for more than a decade.

The Vandergrift Improvement Project owns the building. VIP recently invited Patton Engineering to inspect it and draw plans for a renovation, said Mary Jo Riddle, an officer with the nonprofit group.

VIP can begin applying for grants to fund the renovation once those plans are complete and the renovations have a cost estimate.

“We just don’t know what’s coming,” Riddle said. “Once we have the plans, we’ll know the direction a lot better.”

Edward Patton, owner of the engineering firm, said he is in the early stages of evaluation. The firm just completed drawings of the building in its existing state. Next week, they will begin evaluating costs for taking the building to the “next level,” he said.

Once the plans are completed, Patton said, the nonprofit can begin looking for contract bids to complete the repairs. Riddle said VIP hasn’t even begun researching contractors or sources of grant funding, though, because without the architectural drawings, they won’t know how much improvements will cost.

Restoring the J.C. Penney building has been a priority of the nonprofit for years, Riddle said. The organization had acquired three vacant Vandergrift properties with the goal of putting them back into use. One, at 139 Grant St., became VIP’s office space. Another, at 143 Grant Ave., it sold to the Allusion Brewing Co., which is opening for business in 2020. The J.C. Penney building is the last one.

With no heat, air conditioning or plumbing, it is mostly uninhabitable. Still, the space has been used for various community events, like VIP’s Holiday Night Markets and other vendor gatherings. VIP and other organizations have been making incremental improvements to the building over the last decade.

The building was a principle location for the Cinemax TV series “Banshee” in 2015. Riddle said the production company responsible for the show made a lot of improvements to the space, ridding the building of everything that made it “environmentally unsafe.”

All told, the production company spent more than $500,000 cleaning up the building.

“It had ceilings falling in, all kinds of things falling off the walls, all kinds of asbestos in different areas,” Riddle said.

Working with Patton Engineering to create an improvement plan is another step forward in the process.

“It will be exciting once we move forward because it’s been hanging out there for a while,” she said. “We hope to report more progress by mid-year.”