If NoVo Foundation head Peter Buffett calls a project the “largest project anywhere,” it’s a sign to take it seriously. These were some of the first words Buffett spoke at a tour last week of The Metro, Kingston’s upcoming community mecca, funded by the NoVo Foundation and NoVo in Kingston with a total estimated cost of around $50 million.

Originally a furniture factory and later utilized by Metropolitan Life as the archive for corporate documents, hence the building’s new name, The Metro’s location at 2 South Prospect St. off Greenkill Avenue was purchased by NoVo from RUPCO in 2017 and has been under construction for the past five years. This includes major renovations in nearly every square inch of the over 70,000-square-foot area of the building.

NoVo intends for The Metro to be a representation of the culmination of their biggest focuses as an organization, including providing a one-stop-shop for anything the local youth would need to kickstart and propel their artistic passions. They are also working towards making the building net zero in terms of energy usage with a solar array on the roof for electric and geothermal energy for heating and cooling.

Steering the ship alongside Buffett is Megan Weiss-Rowe, NoVo in Kingston’s executive director and lifelong Kingston resident. The team that will support the magnitude of The Metro is still forming; further announcements on this front are expected later this year.

The plans are ambitious. They include creating dozens of multi-usage rooms and building a second floor in the massive, formerly open area that spans nearly a block in length. It will connect to the 7,000-square-foot, 499-person capacity “Atrium,” an open-space gathering area with a small stage and movie screen. There will also be a state-of-the-art “Fabrication Center,” a 20,000-square-foot creative studio space that currently includes a woodworking and metals studio.

Opportunities for the Metro’s spaces seem endless, and the team crafting the layout seems unperturbed by the grand ideas they propose. There will be many themed rooms spread across the main corridor of the building.

Rolling out over the next year are a culinary center with a commercial and teaching kitchen and baking area and a café with a to-go window; “storytelling studios” with podcast and video equipment; an aesthetician and hair salon; a library with books that “represent the diversity of the community” and provide a quiet space amidst the hubbub going on in the rest of the building; a physical activity center; and a children’s play area.

The idea for these spaces is to provide opportunities to “balance the mind, body and spirit.”

Encompassing the Greenkill-facing portion of the building is the Fabrication Center, led by Janet Hollingsworth, who comes to the job with decades of experience in structural engineering, woodworking, librarianship and education.

The Center places “creative tech” at the forefront of their mission, though Hollingsworth emphasized that “humans are at the beginning of all the work here” and sees the center as a “marriage of traditional and digital methods.” Included in their advanced tech are 3D printers and a massive water jet cutter. Hollingsworth and Zachary Fredin came up with a use for the cutter’s sludge-like byproduct waste material before deciding to buy the machine for the space. Her answer to this waste: ceramics.

The useful material is created by taking the sludge, which is essentially the garnet sand byproduct that is used in the machine with the water jet to do the cutting, and mixing it with ceramic waste, making a binder to use for ceramic material. The process is much more complicated than this; Hollingsworth and Fredin wrote a scientific paper on their findings.

This past summer, Hollingsworth led a project using this material to create 500 tiles each engraved with “messages to the future” from contributing members of the community. These tiles will all be placed around the 23 bathrooms in the facility.

The Fabrication Center, though currently in a partially open phase, is beginning to host tours and eventually pilot workshops by the end of 2026.

Weiss-Rowe said that though the team is planning for many such viable uses for the rooms they are building, they also acknowledge that they “don’t know how the building will be used until the community starts using it.” For this reason, there are many rooms that were made without an intended purpose. The team believes they will find their niche once the community expresses a need for something The Metro lacks.

Buffett says he is “confident this building could be all it’s becoming and more,” and credits a group of teenagers who were a major part of the development process by offering their ideas for what the community would benefit from the most.

One such note they made, which surprised the team, was to see “more nature” come forth in the building’s design. Architect Chris Smailer sourced reclaimed wood from the iconic Coney Island boardwalk that was destroyed in Hurricane Irene from a local distributor. He layered over walls in the building’s main downstairs corridor.

The Metro is predicted to have many of the spaces completed by mid-2027, and more information will be known about an opening date in the coming months.