The chemical know-how and machines that spooled out countless kilometers of film are being eyed for medical marijuana and solar cells, while a private rail line now carries tomatoes alongside coal as photography pioneer Kodak, its bankruptcy behind it, embraces a new role: startup landlord.
The 127-year-old company had buildings and infrastructure to rival a small city when digital photography bumped its familiar yellow boxes from tourists’ camera bags and took over much of Hollywood.
However, rather than selling off its sprawling, 5.18km2 Kodak Park campus, the company has become landlord to 58 diverse companies — and counting — that have been courted with the promise of plentiful utilities, its own railroad and unique access to Kodak’s specialty technical and industrial capabilities.
“There is tremendous value in being able to repurpose the assets that exist here,” said Michael Alt, the retiring director of the renamed Eastman Business Park.
For example, tenant Natcore Technology Inc can tap Kodak’s film-coating capability in its development of solar cells, and LiDestri Food & Beverage uses Kodak’s short-line railroad, which brings coal to the on-site power plant, to haul the tomatoes it processes into pasta sauces and salsa.
Two medical marijuana companies want to put pharmaceutical-grade dispensaries in vacant buildings on the site if New York awards them licenses later this summer.
No one expects the site to again reach its 30,000-worker peak, but estimates of 10,000 to 11,000 employees in a few years are seen as realistic. About 6,000 people now work there, roughly 1,200 of them Kodak employees.
Alt describes the site’s 125-megawatt power plant — capacity enough to serve the equivalent of 100,000 homes — its own water purification plant, wastewater treatment facility, fire department, and chemical and testing labs as amenities that let startup companies target investment toward their specific needs and get to market more quickly. With the 20-month Chapter 11 bankruptcy nearly two years in its past, companies scared off by Kodak’s uncertain future have found reassurance, he and others said.
“One of the things that appealed to us was that Kodak had roll-to-roll equipment that they used in making photo film that they do not use any more because of digital cameras,” said David Rutkin, spokesman for Natcore, which is relocating its corporate headquarters from Red Bank, New Jersey, to Rochester. “One of the things on our radar are flexible solar cells ... and they would be made using the same equipment.”
New York state has so far committed US$100 million to efforts to reinvent the park to a multi-tenant, multi-use site. About half of that funds an environmental trust created last year to clean up and monitor damage to the land and Genesee River from more than a century of filmmaking. Kodak’s share of the trust is US$49 million.
The other state funding has taken the form of tax incentives and grants for the tenant businesses considered crucial to tipping the 506-hectare site from community liability to asset.
“It was a potential challenge to have such a large footprint in the heart of our community potentially go idle or not be leveraged properly,” said Mark Peterson, a member of the Finger Lakes Regional Council created by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to drive economic development in the area.
The council has made the Eastman Business Park its top priority for the past four years.
On Saturday, demolition work on some of the older buildings continued with the implosion of Kodak Building 53, turning it into a pile of rubble.
Given Kodak’s decline, the site also offers plentiful skilled labor. All but one of Natcore’s six lab employees had previously worked for Kodak.
Kodak last year announced plans to sell the business park, but took it off the market in spring this year and has now made it a separate division. The decision followed Kodak’s commitment to grow its remaining motion picture and commercial film business, which requires a hefty 1,219 square kilometers of space, Alt said.
At the federal level, Democratic Representative Louise Slaughter has nudged the US Department of Defense, Department of Energy and others to take notice. The Eastman Business Park and the Energy Department’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory last month announced a collaboration that is to give startup companies access to resources at either facility.
The work of former Kodak engineers using 35-year-old repurposed equipment contributed, for example, to the development of night-vision goggles like those used during the raid that killed former al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, Slaughter said.
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