Justin Sorensen/Watertown Daily Times

From front left, Neighbors of Watertown President Mark G. Gebo, Director Robert L. Recore, Executive Director Gary C. Beasley, County Legislator Jennie M. Adsit, and Mayor Jeffrey E. Graham chat before a ribbon cutting ceremony that marked the start of construction to convert two buildings into apartments.

In recent years, Mayor Jeffrey E. Graham said, he winced every time he drove by and noticed two deteriorating buildings at Stone and Sherman streets.

But work began about two weeks ago on gutting the old Social Security Administration building, 190 Stone St., and the former Watertown Music Center, 196 Stone St., and converting them into 13 apartments.

By the end of May, the $2.1 million project by Neighbors of Watertown will be completed and ready for occupancy, Neighbors Executive Director Gary C. Beasley said.

The restoration project is being funded by a grant from the state’s Homeless Housing and Assistance Program.

“It’ll be good to clean up this corner,” Mr. Beasley said during a ground-breaking ceremony for the project Monday afternoon.

Representatives from Neighbors, general contract ConTech Building Systems in Gouverneur and the city came together to commemorate the project.

Mr. Graham said he’s glad to see the project turn the corner and appreciates Neighbors’s role in cleaning up such blight on the edge of downtown.

The apartments will provide a long-term affordable housing option with support services offered to former clients of the Children’s Home of Jefferson County and the Credo Community Center for the Treatment of Addictions.

The old 6,500-square-foot Social Security building will feature 10 studio apartments and such common areas as a community room and laundry services. The nearly 200-year-old music center building — a former farmhouse and one of the oldest houses in that area of the city — will include a pair of two-bedroom units and a single one-bedroom apartment.

For decades, the smaller building housed a private music center where students learned to play a variety of instruments and then performed at recitals and holiday shows. It then sat vacant for a number of years until Neighbors acquired the property in 2006.

Two dilapidated Sherman Street houses also were demolished to make way for additional green space and a second entrance for the apartment buildings’ parking lot.

Through the McKinney Act of 1987, the federal government donated the Social Security building for $1. Named for former a Connecticut congressman, the act authorizes the Department of Housing and Urban Development to coordinate the disbursement of unused federal property to community groups interested in providing shelter to homeless people, Mr. Beasley said.

The building sat dormant for five years while some bureaucratic red tape was sorted out between the state and federal governments over the property’s mortgage lien, Neighbors Deputy Director Reginald J. Schweitzer said.

“It got as complicated as it could,” Mr. Beasley said.