By Jill Nagy

North Country Commons, one of Clifton Park’s oldest shopping centers, is in the midst of a major facelift— a new facade and a new layout—and is welcoming new tenants, including a swim school and computer games parlor. 

Part of the center, at 1206 Route 146, is a former church that once housed an Albany Public Market. That has been divided into four smaller spaces. The occupant of one of them, Flipside Gaming, opened in November and already has customers lined up every morning waiting for the video and computer game facility to open, according to Howard F. Carr, a broker with Berkshire Hathaway Real Estate, who is managing the center and the renovation project.

Goldfish Swim School, a swim school, already has 600 children signed up for lessons, Carr said. He represents the owners, Whitney Lane Holdings LLC of New York City.

Another tenant new to the center is Clifton Park Beverage Center. The center already has outlets in Colonie and South Troy.

Make-A-Wish Northeast New York is moving its office from Albany to Saratoga Springs this summer. 

Its new headquarters, will be in downtown Saratoga, right off Broadway next door to Fat Paulie’s Delicatessen, 92 Congress St. It will serve as the heart of Make-A-Wish Northeast New York’s community of wish families, volunteers, and staff. 

The organization also welcomes back Kirsten Broschinsky as director of development. Broschinsky brings with her nearly a decade of experience building crucial community and corporate partnerships

“Saratoga, with its cultural heritage, beautiful scenery, and abundant recreational opportunities, provides an ideal stage for creating inspirational wish experiences for children with critical illnesses, their families, and the people that love them,” agency officials said about the move.

 “On behalf of all Saratogians, I extend a joyful welcome to Make-A-Wish Northeast New York,” said Saratoga Mayor Ron Kim in a release. “We are thrilled they have chosen Saratoga Springs as their new home to pursue their all-important mission of making dreams come true to children and their families.”

By Christine Graf  

MRK Real Property, a Clifton Park-based real estate development company, plans to invest between $4 million and $5 million to build apartments at Crescent Commons. Located at 1471 Route 9, the retail and office plaza is currently home to several businesses.  

According to MRK’s Michael Klimkewicz,  “the units will be built on top of the existing plaza’s footprint. All of the existing tenants will remain, and there will be a new roadway going out to Plank Road which will be done this fall.”

The current tenants occupy the first floor of the two-story building, and the second floor is currently vacant. The second floor will be converted into apartments, and a third floor will be added to the building. The residential component of the building will have access to Plank Road while the retail component will face Route 9.

MRK owns several office buildings in the area, and Klimkewicz said it was the decline in demand for office space that was the impetus for the company’s decision to build apartments. At one time, the second floor of Crescent Plaza was occupied by office tenants. 

“The medical market is very strong, but the demand for general office space has been in decline for the past four to five years, and we found that it was becoming more difficult to keep those spaces occupied long term. So, we looked at alternatives, and one of them was to convert that space into apartments. It just made sense,” he said. 

The company received Planned Development District approval from the town of Halfmoon to construct 60 apartments, 40 garages, two new means of access to the plaza, expansion of the Fred the Butcher business, expansion of Emma Jayne’s Restaurant, and a new commercial building on Route 236. Emma Janye’s has already added a 1,400-square-foot deck to the restaurant.

Cornell Cooperative Extension of Saratoga County has broken ground on a new Community STEM and Agricultural Educational Center at the 4-H Training Center on Middleline Road in Ballston Spa. 

The 3,650-square-foot facility will encompass three state-of-the-art classrooms and will increase opportunities for the Saratoga County 4-H program as well as outside youth organizations, officials said. The project has been on the table for over eight years. 

“The Program Committee and I saw a need for increased classroom space. We had outgrown the meeting space that we currently have, which is utilized by our 4-H clubs, as well as many other organizations from across the county,” said Greg Stevens, 4-H program leader. 

The program looked at many options and landed on expansion via a totally new educational center. The CCE/Saratoga County board of directors gave their approval for the project, and the committee quickly got to work and began to design.

When the pandemic hit, the capital campaign to raise funds for building was put on hold. 

By Paul Post

A husband-and-wife business couple has a whole new revenue stream created by simply  responding to customers who can’t find the product they need elsewhere.

Halfmoon Sunoco introduced the new line of race fuels in April that power everything from classic vintage automobiles to snowmobiles, ATVs and motocross bikes.

“This was one of those amazing opportunities to show our customers, ‘Hey, we hear you. Let’s figure out if we can do this and how’,” said Marilyn Lupo-Sehgal. “We’re really close with a lot of our customers so whenever there’s a void for some type of service they come to us. Being that we’re Sunoco, we try our best to see how we can utilize our connections and provide what they want.”

She and her husband, Ankit, purchased the store, across from Halfmoon Diner at the corner of Route 9 and Grooms Road, in 2015.

Previously, Sunoco race fuels were sold at a station in Malta. But when Stewart’s Shops took the site over, it stopped offering this type of fuel, creating a void between Queensbury and Albany.

The U.S. Department of Defense, through the Defense Microelectronics Activity, Trusted Access Program Office, has accredited GlobalFoundries’ advanced manufacturing facility in Malta as a Category 1A Trusted Supplier with the ability to manufacture secure semiconductors for a range of critical aerospace and defense applications.

The latest milestone in the longstanding partnership between the government and GlobalFoundries, the accreditation was enabled by GlobalFoundries’ ability to meet requirements for having stringent security processes, equipment, and oversight in place to accept and protect sensitive information and manufacture trusted chips in a way that ensures they are secure and uncompromised. 

These securely manufactured chips include those manufactured on GlobalFoundries’ most advanced 12nm FinFET technologies, and will be used in DoD systems on land, air, sea, and in space, officials said.

“The secure manufacturing of semiconductors is critical to safeguarding the confidentiality, integrity, and reliability of the technology that powers our modern world, and nowhere is this more important than aerospace, defense, and critical infrastructure systems,” said Dr. Thomas Caulfield, president and CEO of GlobalFoundries. “We are proud to deepen our relationship with the Defense Department, and to receive DMEA accreditation at our New York manufacturing facility. GlobalFoundries differentiated chip technologies provide optimized performance for critical DoD systems, and we are uniquely positioned by our ability to provide secure semiconductor manufacturing at scale.”

By Susan Elise Campbell

A new eatery downtown Ballston Spa is inventing fresh ways to satisfy the palates of a variety of customers, whether their tastes are more traditional or more adventurous. 

It’s called 42 Fusion, and owners Alicia Halse and Tino Lopez soft-launched their concept restaurant at 42 Front St. in May.

“When people hear the word ‘fusion’ they usually think about Asian cuisine,” said Halse. “But we are blending the flavors and spices of Mexico with classic Italian ingredients.”

Halse and Lopez became family friends in recent years. The first time Lopez’s daughter told Halse about her father’s Mexican lasagna, she thought, “No way, I love my ricotta,” she said.

But the oaxaca cheese with chorizo sausage —along with traditional meat and mozzarella —formed a flavor profile that Halse said was better than any lasagna she had tasted before.