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OSSINING RESIDENTS DENNIS KIRBY AND WAYNE SPECTOR share a vision for their village's historic downtown and its long-awaited revitalization.
Co-founders of Grow Ossining, a community investment initiative that last year raised $10,000 in seed money from 100 local residents and business owners to launch what was then a still unformed commercial venture, the men have anchored their vision in a 19th-century brick building that stands at the corner of downtown Central Avenue and Brandreth Street, just around the corner from Ossining's faded Main Street retail corridor.
A three-level commercial building that once housed a garment factory's rows of sewing machines and is occupied by upholstery and embroidery shops on the ground floor and artist lofts upstairs, it originally was the Olive Opera House. Built in 1874, it replaced the first, gaslight-illumined opera hall that opened in 1865 on the site and was destroyed by fire nine years later. Kirby and Spector think a restored Olive Opera House, with a downstairs restaurant and catering business that profits from serving arts audiences and wedding and party guests at a nonprofit performing arts and events center upstairs, could be the cultural "sparkplug" that Spector said is needed to draw restaurateurs, other entrepreneurs and visitors to their riverfront village.
"Ossining needs something," said Spector, a partner at Cohn & Spector Esqs. in White Plains and attorney for the town of Ossining. "Pleasantville has the Burns Center. Tarrytown has the Music Hall. Port...