Today, the site is a pile of bricks nearly 10 feet high, littered with rusted steel, mortar, charred wood and soot. It’s burned-out testament to a bygone era.

Gloversville officials had such visions for the property at the former Fownes Brothers Glove Co. building at 102 S. Main St.: market-rate housing, maybe, or any number of uses that could turn its early industrial character into an attractive asset.

“It might have been attractive to a developer who could stack grants,” said Gloversville Mayor Vincent DeSantis. “Once stabilized, we have time to market the building.”

Then came the fire: A 17-year-old was accused of setting it April 29 and charged with arson, burglary, criminal mischief and reckless endangerment — felonies. It destroyed the four-story building and two others.

“Now we have this pile of bricks,” DeSantis said.

For now. The City Council voted unanimously last week at a special meeting to award a contract to prepare bid documents to clear the site and get it ready for redevelopment to HRP Associates of Clifton Park. Expect the consultant to start work early next month.

The money comes from a $1.5 million state grant that the city had planned to apply for to restore the site, before the fire. The state Department of Housing and Community Renewal normally limits such grants to $1 million from the $10 million fund and the city initially planned to seek $500,000, but the state agreed to increase this one to $1.5 million to prepare this site and several others.

“It was a major, major win for us,” DeSantis said.

The collection of work is meant to prepare brownfields for redevelopment. The challenge with brownfield development isn’t that they’re necessarily contaminated, but that nobody actually knows. Gloversville’s Brownfield Opportunity Area is meant to answer that question, making future development that much easier.

“We think it’s clean because it was a glove factory, but it was not a tannery,” DeSantis said.

A convenience store operates across one street, and a radio station across another. However, many of the neighboring buildings are vacant, some of them still bearing signs for the Samco Gloves Factory outlet shop, or Louis Meyers and Son. The Jesse Hall next door was built in 1890.

Noor Yousef will be glad just to get rid of the rubble. “I’m tired of seeing the bricks,” said Yousef, whose father, Tony Francis, recently bought and began operating Schlegal’s Auto Service across from the site. A nearly century-old car sits in the lot, giving some idea what the neighborhood might have looked like when the factory was operating.

“A food place would be nice,” Yousef said. “Another gas station would be great.”

Or perhaps more high-density residential housing, suggested Scott Henze, the executive director of the Fulton County Industrial Development Agency. The IDA doesn’t have a role in the project, but Henze said the city has been pursuing a variety of housing projects.

“They’re definitely working pretty hard on re-developing the city,” he said Monday. “It’s pretty much in the center of downtown. And they’re trying to increase their core residential units there. Housing would be very important to maintain.”

Perhaps, he suggested the first floor could be commercial space, with residential space on upper floors. It’s a trend in older urban areas, creating walkable communities where people can live, work and entertain themselves in a relatively small area — much like the small industrial towns of a century ago, such as Gloversville.

Market-rate housing would be good, because it comes with higher rents and more affluent........

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