Dear Editor:
On Tuesday, May 1st at 7 p.m. in the conference room at City Hall (entrance on Newark St.) there will be a Planning Board meeting at City Hall to continue the discussion of approving a 376 car garage on the corner of 8th and Hudson. The engineering school of Stevens Institute wants to get into the parking garage business. Citizens should attend to be informed about the latest parking garage coming into a residential area.
Huge parking garages are popping up everywhere in town. Right now, no neighborhood is safe. It just takes the city government to claim eminent domain, and then one day the building that you may have called home will be taken from you and knocked down for a parking garage. That is what happened between 3rd and 4th Streets, on Clinton behind the hospital. People’s homes were lost so that a parking garage, almost the length of a whole city block, could be built for 740 cars.
Since this is not the suburbs with two-way roads and drive-ways, cars need to be limited in this one square mile city where air and noise pollution from any additional automobiles will adversely affect people that live so close to the streets. In an over-developed town that cannot accommodate any new traffic, parking garages will only encourage and exacerbate the existing traffic congestion. We have yet to feel the damaging effects upon the residents living near the 916 Garden automatic garage that the city allowed. It was an experimental structure that sits unfinished as a result of being handled poorly by the city and all contracting parties involved.
We are in for some serious environmental problems with all these parking garages located in such close proximity to each other and on one-way streets. With the 916 Garden garage, the 3rd and Clinton Street garage just under construction and Stevens wanting to build a commercial garage on the corner of Hudson and 8th, we are being systematically imprisoned with future permanent automobile traffic that will choke us with exhaust fumes from waiting vehicles at crowded intersections.
Hudson Street is already feeling the weight of traffic because of the new buildings on 14th and Hudson and will have the added burden of all the future traffic that will result from the waterfront development on River Road. Allowing another parking garage on Hudson will only increase the noise pollution and congestion for a traffic and environmental nightmare. Remember this is a town where people live and not a holding tank for cars.
Mary Ondrejka