LP Azar eyes hardware hub and youth trades centre at former Gleaner site

LP Azar Limited intends to remodel the former premises of The Gleaner Company (Media) Limited as a hardware, manufacturing and training facility.

Andrew Azar, principal of LP Azar Limited, told the Financial Gleaner the work could start at once. “We’re looking at beginning immediately,” he said. “We’re going to work this year as hard as we can, so hopefully we’ll have her ready by the first quarter of 2027.”

After almost 60 years at the location, RJRGLEANER Communications Group — parent of The Gleaner — disposed of the building to LP Azar Limited and brought its workforce and operations together at the Lyndhurst Road campus.

Azar plans a hardware distribution hub on the East Street frontage that once served The Gleaner’s warehouse and loading bay. The four upper floors of offices above the ground level will be renovated for LP Azar Limited’s own use and for other occupants.

“Those former offices will be refurbished, and then we’ll put some of our offices down there, plus rent out the extra space,” Azar said. He also intends to convert the old gym and sports club into a trade training facility covering welding, plumbing, carpentry and, potentially, garment making. The programme, he noted, will focus on young people in central Kingston.

Listings had marketed the asset at US$8.54 million, roughly $1.4 billion. Azar would not reveal what LP Azar Limited paid.

“It’s definitely over what the valuation was, because there was a bidding process and several other people were bidding for the building,” he recalled.

He offered no projection for renovation spending, saying any number “would just be a pie-in-the-sky figure”.

“We need to dress her up a little bit,” Azar said.

The structure at 7 North Street in Kingston is 57 years old. Building work started in 1967 and the complex was finished and fully opened in 1969. Before that move, The Gleaner Company spent its first 135 years based on Harbour Street, then shifted to North and East streets. The holding covers about 2.5 to 3 acres and includes a five-storey commercial block that originally contained corporate offices, a warehouse and a printing plant.

Azar told the Financial Gleaner the North Street scheme sits within a wider renewal push. He earlier assumed control of Victoria Pier, long occupied by homeless people and a handful of goats. That pier is 69 years old; the present structure was formally opened on November 6, 1957.

Over time the pier changed from a busy historic landing point into a revived waterfront dining and entertainment venue under the Kingston Waterfront Development. When he refurbished Victoria Pier, Azar said, he made a point of hiring unattached young people to steer them away from crime.

“Right now, if you see some of those people, they have a family now; one of them has a son going to a top-tier school, they have a little car, and so on,” Azar said, stressing that wanting a chance is hardly a radical idea.

“When a man doesn’t have an opportunity, he turns to the gun, to stealing, and begging,” he said. “If you give a man the opportunity, the odds are he’s going to work.”

He urged businesses to revive neglected buildings accumulated over many years.

“Wishing is not going to help; it needs the private sector to buy the old buildings and invest in Jamaica, and to convert the buildings into something nice, starting from the waterfront and coming right up. That’s the only way. It won’t happen by wishing,” Azar said.