A rendering showing the baseball stadium and canal that developer Tom Burke had hoped to build north of downtown Albany.

Years before the proposal to build a downtown Albany soccer stadium, developer Tom Burke hoped to construct a baseball stadium and much more in the North Albany warehouse district.

You probably never heard about it. Few people did.

Advertisement

Article continues below this ad

But Burke took his 2017 proposal to city, state and county officials and was serious enough about it, he says, to talk to the New York Mets about moving their AAA affiliate to Albany. He even had the Central Warehouse under contract, planning to demolish the eyesore to make way for the stadium.

“I wanted to have a plan for the entire area that would be live, work and play,” the CEO of Burke Cos. told me Monday in his Malta office. “We would have solved the issues that have plagued the city historically.”

Burke’s plan would have remade much of the warehouse district. It included, most notably, a baseball stadium near where the Central Warehouse (still) stands but also featured a canal that would have stretched several blocks north to Tivoli Street, near the building on which Nipper sits. (Good boy!)

That’s hardly all. Renderings Burke dragged out to show me also featured a massive marina along the river north of downtown Albany; a soccer complex built atop parking structures; hotels, apartments, offices and stores stretching northward along the canal; and a train station serving Amtrak near the baseball stadium.........

© Times Union