Masonic Temple bought with plans of a theater

The former Binghamton Masonic Temple on Main Street could finally get new life under the vision of its newest owner.

John Diehl, of Binghamton, purchased the 74,299 square-foot landmark for $7,500 at the Broome County tax foreclosure auction on Feb. 21.

Diehl, 40, said he and a small group want to renovate the existing theater inside the building and use it to bring live music shows back to the area.

“There is a lot of desirability now for bands to play smaller venues,” Diehl said. “Talking to people in the industry, they want something here. People in the community want to see it here.”

In addition to renovating the theater, Diehl said he would like to create a community performing arts center in the building, with classrooms and opportunities for instruction for residents.

The six-story stone structure at 66 Main St. has sat vacant and deteriorating since the 1990s. Once a community gathering hub and the center of regional Mason activities, the building slid into disrepair after it was first foreclosed on in 1997.

In 2000, a Florida-based developer bought the building at a public auction for $85,000. But unpaid taxes repeatedly put the property on the brink of foreclosure, and after a series of failed attempts by the developer to turn the building into apartments, Broome County took ownership of the property for back taxes last year, putting it up for auction in the fall.

David Hamlin, director of the county’s Real Property Tax Service, said the building needs “a tremendous amount of work.”

The county turned down the highest bid on the temple at the fall auction for lack of a solid business plan on the part of the bidder, Hamlin said.

At the auction on Feb. 21, where the temple was one of 55 tax-foreclosed properties up for sale, the county stipulated it would only consider bidders who had a serious plan for the historic building.

“Pieces of property like that, what we’re trying to really do is ... let it have an effect on the area,” Hamlin said. “(Diehl’s plan) certainly would.”

Diehl, an engineer at McIntosh Labs, said downtown Binghamton has started to come back in the last couple of years. The plans for the Masonic Temple, which sits on the corner of Murray Street near Binghamton High School, would get the building cleaned up and help start to spread some of the development across the bridge and down the rest of Main Street, he said.

If everything goes as planned, the end product would be a place residents feel good about and one that brings energy back to the area, Diehl said.

“Ideally, we’d like to see national acts come back through, like years ago,” Diehl said. “Events that would bring in — out of New York City, out of Philadelphia — bands that are driving by Binghamton every day. They go from New York to Buffalo or Toronto.”

The plan is to do the work in steps, with the first focus on cleaning up the theater area. The group is in the process of collecting bids for the work, and there is no estimate yet of what the total cost of renovation would be, Diehl said.

A proposed time frame for when the project would start is unclear.

Last year, the property had a full market value $198,795, according to Broome County property records.

Follow Megan Brockett on Twitter @PSBMegan.