Ex-nursing home in Alliance demolished

ALLIANCE – The eyesore is no more.

The ex-nursing home facility at 1495 Freshley Ave. recently was demolished, and the land is under new ownership.

Alliance Ventures, a property development company, has taken over the site. The Alliance-based company owns a variety of properties in the Carnation City.

Earlier this year the Greater Alliance Development Corporation put out a request for proposals for development of the seven-acre property. The organization evaluated proposals on three criteria: intended use, viability and purchase offer. Within these categories, the agency also assessed factors such as economic impact, compatibility with the area, financing and the history and experience of the developer. 

"When they did put that out there to be bid on through the city, there was kind of a metric that required that it wasn't going to be based off just the price," said Rick Baxter, president of Alliance Area Development. "It was also going to be based off the best use of the property ... for future job creation, things like that."

City officials hoped to see a large-scale commercial retailer or industrial employer develop the property, which formerly housed Horizon Meadows Nursing Home. The call for proposals said the city would give preference to ideas entailing commercial retail facilities no smaller than 100,000 square feet or industrial companies that would employ at least 100 workers. 

City Director of Planning and Development Joe Mazzola said Alliance Ventures owns the parcel surrounding the former nursing home property and that having the additional acreage would allow for a more expansive site plan and accommodate for many different building layouts.

"This makes it more attractive for development if they have both of those parcels under the same ownership," he said.

Baxter said there is potential for the Freshley Avenue site to become an expansion of the city's industrial park. Alliance Commerce Park contains multiple businesses that employ hundreds of workers, including Trilogy Plastics, MAC Trailer, Coastal Pet, Winkle Industries and Robertson Heating Supply.

"Our industrial park right now has a lot of activity on it," he said. "So there's quite a possibility that we could be filling up our current industrial park, so we're starting to look at phase two, and that could be part of the phase two."

What happened to Horizon Meadows?

Horizon Meadows was a 78-bed facility that accepted elderly residents and people with behavioral disabilities. It opened under a different name in 1961 and closed its doors in 2002, roughly two years after the Maryland-based company that owned Horizon Meadows filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

At the time of its closure, the facility housed 46 residents ages 31 to 93 and had 57 employees, according to a 2002 article from The Alliance Review.

The former nursing home has remained empty since it shut down 20 years ago. In recent years, the buildings have deteriorated. They had many broken windows and weeds and scrubs growing along the sides of them. Many Alliance residents posted on Facebook saying they were happy to see the blighted facilities come down.

Baxter said eliminating an eyesore property is important because it puts focus on the land rather than a dilapidated facility and makes it easier to look for potential companies to bring in and create jobs in the city.

Reach Paige at 330-580-8577 or pmbennett@gannett.com, or on Twitter at @paigembenn.