Just few years ago, it was looking like the Market Street / Center Street intersection was going to be revitalized.

The action centered at the time on a plan presented by Kingston-based architect Scott Dutton and his then-partner on the project, Kevin O’Connor. They were going to gut and renew 23 Market Street, the one-time home of the Devil Dogs Dungarees jeans brand, which back in the 1940s and ‘50s, was a thriving business in Ellenville.

The plan would see the 24,412 square foot former factory become apartments and working space for designers and creative professionals.

However, Dutton told the Shawangunk Journal this week that the current economic has changed his plans.

“This is just not a good time for me to be doing this project,” he said. “The rise in interest rates has just about doubled from where we started this. Then there’s the impact from tariffs on construction costs.”

Along the way Dutton and O’Connor parted ways. Dutton bought out his partner, so the 23 Market Street project became his alone.

“I was going to raise some capital, maybe sell off a piece of the project,” he explained. “But the tariffs have made it difficult. I expected steel and lumber to go up, but I did not expect concrete to do that. Then there’s gypsum drywall, with two 10 percent increases in the last year.”

It seems that all the numbers on the initial application are now obsolete.

“Electric bids are coming in now at almost double what they were last year.”

As a result, the property is now on the market, complete with all approvals from the village planning board.

“So, this is a ‘turnkey’ shovel ready project with fully stamped plans,” says Dutton, somewhat wistfully.

The plan, still approved, calls for creating 13 apartments in the building, on the upper floor and 8 ‘maker spaces’ or studios on the ground floor. This would make the building a combination of a small business incubator and an arts center, with a healthy number of rentable apartments upstairs.

The sale price listed now is $795,000. The project with details can be seen at https://svn.com/properties/?propertyId=1448546-sale

“Too much instability,” Dutton summed it up. “That’s really bad for development.”