In a town where a community movement against large development has swelled over the last three years, there has been little chatter about two 17-story towers that are about to rise near the city’s southern border. That may be because most people don’t know about them.
The project, which obtained Zoning Board approval back in 1998 with major variances, may help revitalize one of the city’s less-developed areas of town. The builders note that the 326-unit high rises will inject a total of approximately $1.2 million each year into the city, school, and county’s tax coffers.
But the development insiders who know about it say it’s too big and will cause traffic and parking nightmares. In addition, a law on the city’s books says that developers obtaining variances must take action on a development within a year of its approval. 101 Marshall St. got approval in October of 1998, and there is some debate about what has constituted action since then. Pile-driving to lay a foundation only began a few months ago, according to a neighbor.
The 77,500 square foot lot on which the project will be built is located in the shadows of the Palisade hills, adjacent to where the tracks for the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail system are being laid. The two towers will rise 158 feet and four inches each, and will contain two restaurants, a 25,384 square foot health club, 5,240 square feet of retail space, and an enclosed parking garage that will rise seven stories, with 431 spaces.
Currently, the site is cleared and drivers are hammering home steel piles in the process of constructing the building’s foundation.
“This could be a marvelous project somewhere in Manhattan,” said activist Michael Lenz, one time 4th Ward Council candidate who was Mayor David Roberts’ campaign manager during the last election. “But it’s totally out of scale in Hoboken.”
But Sanford Weiss, who owns Manhattan Builders, the Hoboken-based company that is constructing the project, believes that it has many positives. “It will bring in $1.2 million a year to a city that finds itself in the middle of a fiscal crisis,” he said Wednesday. “There is a shortfall in the budget and I don’t want to wake up one morning and see my tax rate double. We are bringing in jobs and ratables and are enhancing a neighborhood that needs it. We’re taking a vacant lot and turning it into revenue for the city.”
Under the radar
The project may be good for the city, but it is unusual that it gained various approvals over the last three years without arousing comments from politicians or neighbors.
“Huh?” said a puzzled Roberto Hernandez, who lives at Madison and Second streets, Tuesday. “I know there was something going on down there, but that is huge. I had no idea.”
The project got its first approval almost three and a half years ago, during the middle of the Hoboken building boom and former Mayor Anthony Russo’s administration.
“It was approved prior to us getting here,” said Fred Bado, the director of community development for the administration of Mayor David Roberts, Tuesday. Roberts took office July 1. “My position is that the project is too big. There are too many units, and to have seven stories of parking so close to a major entrance of the city is questionable to say the least.”
Major variances
Besides the lack of comment, something else that is unusual is the magnitude of zoning changes that the development was allowed.
In 1998, developer Rene Abreu, the owner of several real estate, mortgage, and tax appraisal companies, submitted and got approval for the 17-story towers for one of his companies, Gateway LLC. Abreu, a developer and Democratic fundraiser, has served on the fundraising committees of Rep. Robert Menendez and Sen. Robert Torricelli, according to reports in various newspapers including the New York Times. He was also one of many local developers who contributed money to the campaign of former Hoboken Mayor Anthony Russo in 1997. Abreu’s offices in Guttenberg were raided in 1997 by the FBI, but no charges have resulted as yet. The FBI has never commented on what they were investigating.
Multiple calls were made to Abreu’s office for comment, but none were returned.
The approvals include massive variances – or deviances from zoning guidelines – and these passed the Zoning Board by a vote of 6-0 in October of 1998.
At the time the project went before the board, the residential zone that the project is in allowed, by ordinance, a five-story building with 60 percent lot coverage.
The 101 Marshall project is 12 stories higher than that, and got approval for 100 percent lot coverage.
Other variances include parking variances. By ordinance, the project should provide 484 off-street parking spaces, but it was approved with only 431. The city ordinances also state that a parking facility must have non-parking uses facing the streets, such as stores, but this proposal has none.
In the request for the variances, the attorneys for the developers stated, “The granting of the requested variances will not cause any substantial detriment to the public good and can be granted without substantially impairing the intent and purpose of the Hoboken zoning ordinances. The project will create a stable neighborhood, which will provide an anchor at the west side of the city of Hoboken.”
Despite having such large variances, the project went virtually unnoticed in 1998.
“This project never should have been approved in the first place, but somehow it slipped under the notice of too many people, including myself,” said Lenz.
By law, the Zoning Board notifies neighbors within 200 feet of a project of upcoming hearings regarding that project. However, there are few homes directly within 200 feet of the site.
The Zoning Board’s chair at the time, Joseph Crimmins, could not be reached for comment at the end of last week. Several other members of the board had not returned phone calls by press time.
Twists to the story
In a twist to the story, Abreu’s attorneys and architect approached the board again in 1999 with a downsized version of the project. According to the project’s architect, this made the project “more marketable” and “easier to put together.”
The downscaled project called for only 226 residential units instead of 326. The smaller project would have three six-story buildings and only 64 percent lot coverage and 197 off-street parking spaces.
Architect William Van Ryzin said at a September 1999 public hearing of the Zoning Board that the smaller building had benefits. “The original approval was two high rises,” said Ryzin at the hearing, according to the transcript of the meeting. “The downscaled version is more of a Hoboken style that [the developers] feel would be more marketable and it would be more in keeping with the flavor and the popular type of housing that you find in Hoboken and what’s being built nowadays.”
The Zoning Board approved a resolution approving the smaller project in the fall of 1999. But then in the fall of 2000, the developers changed their minds.
Attorney John O’Donnell asked the board for an ordinance interpretation for Gateway. The developers wanted to see if it was possible to revert to the 17-story original plan.
“The later resolution did not terminate the rights granted to Gateway by the Zoning Board by the Oct. 28, 1998 resolution,” said O’Donnell in his request for interpretation.
The Zoning Board agreed and adopted a resolution in October 2000 that granted the developers permission to return to the original plans, the 17-story towers.
On Oct. 24, 2000, Zoning Officer Joel Mestre signed off on the towers and filed the zoning approvals in the construction office.
What’s happening now?
Over the last few years, residents concerned about the possibility of overdevelopment in Hoboken have protested large projects all over town and have gotten involved in municipal elections. Some of the projects under protest are shorter than the proposed towers on Marshall Street, so it is unusual that such a project would escape public notice.
When piles recently started going into the ground, neighbors wondered what was stirring.
“I could see that the building site had been cleared, and saw them driving piles there,” said John Gregorio, who moved a block away from the area not long ago. “I went to Town Hall [this past November] to see what is being built there, and at first they said I couldn’t see the plans. Then, when I finally did, they were for six and nine story buildings. I was kind of okay with that. But while I was in the office, the builder’s architect was there getting revisions on the plan and told me that it was going to be two 17-story buildings.”
The approval process for this project has drawn concern from some.
“I’m writing to object to the demolition and eventual construction which was permitted on or about October 20, 2000, at [101 Marshall Street],” wrote Michael Lenz in an August 8, 2001 letter to Mestre that is in the 101 Marshall St. file in the Zoning office. He contended that zoning variances for the land should have lapsed by then.
According to the city’s attorney, Ester Suarez, developers have one year to act upon a variance or else it expires. She added Thursday that the ordinance that governs variance expiration is located in the city’s municipal code [44-19]. The original approvals for the project were granted on Oct. 28, 1998. The approvals then had to be published, and at that point there was a 20-day waiting period until any new resolution could go into effect, which put the one-year period to start construction toward the end of November 1999.
The developers contended, in records at the Zoning Office, that action was taken when revisions and changes to the plans were made in October 1999.
But Lenz disagreed. “I believe this to be a good and important law, as it keeps developers from applying for excessive approvals, in hopes of increasing the value of their land, and then shopping the deal at a time where such an out-of-scale project would face greater scrutiny,” Lenz noted.
When asked about the project, Mestre said he has no comment on the project or on the process by which it gained approval.
Who is building is it?
In the first half of 2000, the property and the zoning approvals were sold. According to record in the tax assessors’ office in City Hall, the site is now owned by Marshall/Harrison Street Apartment LLC, located at 98 Park Ave. in Hoboken. That is an address of Manhattan Builders, which is owned by Sanford “Sandy” Weiss. Weiss has also been, for some time, trying to redevelop a dilapidated area at the city’s northern border. Construction Official Al Arezzo said last week that in the 101 Marshall St. file at City Hall, there are also permits to lay the foundation for the project and all the appropriate zoning approvals to build it. Both the zoning approvals and the foundation permit are under the name Gateway, which was owned by Abreu, but the address of the listed developer is 98 Park, and the phone number listed is that of Manhattan Builders, he said. Weiss said last week that he is not, in fact, the developer but is only building the project. He said that Marshall/Harrison Street Apartment LLC is actually a group of investors from Boston.
Attempts to contact Marshall/Harrison were unsuccessful. Weiss declined to give out the numbers of the investors, and no number was listed in Boston for Marshall/Harrison Street Apartments.
Weiss is not a newcomer to Hoboken development. His Manhattan Builders has developed and built a number of small, mid-size and large luxury residential projects in the mile-square city. One of the most visible is the high rise Skyline Building at 551 Observer Hwy., which was built in 1988. Examples of recent mid-sized projects are Thomas Jefferson I and II at 72 and 80 Jefferson St. respectively, which were completed in 1999, and the apartments and condos at 87 Park Ave., which were finished in 1997.
In April of 1998, Weiss’ name made the papers when he proposed two 21-story buildings on a three-story base at 1600 Park Ave., a vacant piece of land between the Park and Willow Avenue bridges on the Weehawken/Hoboken border. The structure was to include 351 apartments of varying sizes. After public pressure forced him back down from his proposal, Weiss returned to the board in Nov. 1999 with an 18-story proposal. The proposed “C” shaped building would have had nearly the same number of units.
Public support was still lackluster, and the project languished at the board for months until Weiss dropped a proposal in favor of a nine-story building. According to city officials, that project is in litigation. The developers are seeking to get default approval for 1600 Park because they believe that the time period the Planning Board had to make a decision has passed. The results of that litigation are pending.
Opinions are mixed
Although the 101 Harrison St. project was approved over three years ago, only now are more people becoming aware of it.
“I am vehemently opposed to this project,” said 4th Ward Councilman Christopher Campos when contacted last week. Campos’ ward contains the project. “It’s horrible for us,” he said. “I think it will have a deleterious effect on the community in terms of the added traffic burden it will create. It’s a shame that we inherited this project and it is frustrating that we have to have this being built while we are trying to alleviate the burdens of ‘overdevelopment.’ ”
He added that he and the city are in the process of investigating options to change the course of the project, but admitted that at such a late stage the city’s hands may be tied.
Weiss denied that the project will have a detrimental effect on the city’s streets. “In residential buildings such as this one, 80 percent of the residents take mass transportation instead of their cars to work,” said Weiss. “With the light rail coming, the PATH and New Jersey Transit so close, very few of these people will use their cars during the day. We know for a fact that during the day garages in resident buildings in Hoboken remain full, and it’s only on the weekends that people really use their cars.”
He added that in his opinion, the main cause of increased traffic is the growth of office space in Jersey City and commuters traveling between the Lincoln and Holland tunnels.
Some neighbors had mixed opinions.
“I don’t know much about it, but that’s a big building,” said Robert Nunez, a resident of Fourth and Madison streets, Tuesday. “It’s their land and they should be able to build what they want, but that seems out of whack with everything else in town.”
Weiss addressed the issue about the project being large. “This project is about neighborhood-building,” he said. “In order to create a neighborhood you need to infuse a certain amount of people. A 20-unit complex is just not going to do it. You need more people than that. We are going to take an underused, blighted area and turn it into a tax-producing community.”
He added that this type of building would not be proper if it were on the interior of town. But on the perimeter near mass transit options, he said, it is prudent planning.
Sewer issue
According Director of Community Development Fred Bado, the developers have not been granted permits to hook up the construction to the city’s sewer hook-ups.
“That area is about two feet below sea level and a heavy rain can easily cause flooding,” said Bado Tuesday. “Adding that many people to the area will increase the possibility of flooding and could create a serious situation.”
Bado added that the developers, the city and the North Hudson Sewage Authority are working on a solution to the issue. Bado added that the city can not grant the permit to build above the foundation until the sewage permits are granted.
Weiss said Wednesday that the sewer issue is not nearly as serious as some might make out. “I have heard the rumors, too,” he said, “but they are just not true. All of our permits are in place or are being processed. There aren’t going to be any major snags when it comes to the sewage hook-ups.”