Investors led by Flaumbuy Triangle Building

Will Astor//January 9, 1998//

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A group of local investors led by Flaum Management Co. Inc. CEO David Flaum has purchased the Triangle Building.
Flaum said the group bought the small but strategically located structure more as a downtown revitalization move than a financial investment.
“I think it’s a very important corner,” he said. “There needs to be a tenant there.”
The building at East Main Street and East Avenue sits at the southeast corner of the Liberty Pole plaza and within a stone’s throw of Midtown Plaza.
Formerly owned by Jasco Tools Inc. CEO John Summers, the 25,000-square-foot Triangle Building has sat virtually empty for some months. The first floor, once occupied by a Marine Midland Bank branch, has stood vacant since the bank closed the branch in the early 1990s.
Flaum said he is in talks with another bank that he believes will lease the structure’s first floor, and is hopeful of signing upper-floor occupants once substantial renovations to the structure are completed.
Returning a financial institution to the Triangle Building’s highly visible ground-floor space will send a positive message in keeping revitalization efforts throughout downtown, he said.
Among positive trends Flaum cited were the recent purchase of Midtown Plaza by California developer Peter Arnold, president of Arnold Industries Inc., and Monroe County’s decision to move some 300 workers to the former Rochester Institute of Technology City Center on West Main Street.
“I like what Arnold is doing. Midtown really needed redoing,” Flaum said.
Arnold has not yet made significant changes to the mixed-use mall, but has said that he plans to reposition the retail and office complex. Local experts, meanwhile, have praised the management firm Arnold hired to run Midtown, the Chicago-based LaSalle Partners Inc., as one of the top companies of its type in the world.
Flaum’s own firm has overseen development of an entertainment space in the city-owned High Falls Center at the other end of downtown.
Another long-vacant former bank building once occupied by the now-vanished Monroe Savings Bank FSB sits across the street from the Triangle Building, and is currently on the market.
Flaum said he has no plans at this time to acquire that structure.