The developer met with the neighborhood civic association yesterday to outline their plan. There will be two residential towers with a total of 1,200 units, probably in the 60-story range (I missed the part of the meeting where they divulged the exact heights). The current 1,000-space parking garage will be completely demolished. The new building will include 450 garage spaces.
Timeline: They will seek Planning Board approval within the next month. They hope to break ground within two years as soon as they line up financing, and finish the full project within seven to eight years.
Open Space: The plan includes an esplanade along the edge of the site, overlooking the PATH tracks. They also hope to build a park at the end of Van Reipen Ave, and a pedestrian plaza at the end of Magnolia Ave.
Arts District: They seek to connect Mana Contemporary and the Loews Theater with a series of cultural spaces and galleries, including a black-box theater. These will be contained in 2 or 3 additional low-rise buildings on the same site as the towers.
They presented renderings and an updated site plan at the meeting. These will be emailed to the community in the next week. I’ll post them as soon as I receive them.
To give you an idea of where this site is located, it’s on the gray parcel marked “10” on this zoning map (the orange parcels marked “2” are the PATH right-of-way):
Here’s a site plan for the development from September of last year. Up is east in this map. The towers will be Bldg 1 and Bldg 4. The landmarked Loews Theater is the rightmost building (unmarked, to the right of Site 6).
Yup! Between this and the rival kushner plans on the square, we’re looking at 5000 apartments in eight 55-75-story towers within a two minute walk of the train station!
KRE & Silverstein properties bought the site. New renderings below. Still has 1,189 apartments but parking reduced to 369. Note that the 49-story tower would be built first.
Just viewed all the Revit drawings on that pdf. Wow! This will be so prominent and a nice design change from Journal Squared. Also, I think the park facing the tracks will be a very welcome addition since I don’t think that’s ever been accessible before.
The design of the towers makes One Journal Square across from the Loew’s even more lame. Everything around it will look varied, and it sits in the middle, all glass lol.
My guess would be if it’s central air there is no way to charge the tenants for their exact utility use. They would have to esitmate and charge a monthly fee and they’d prefer to have all the tenants pay their own utilities. I could be way off though.
