More information is needed before the Zoning Board of Adjustments can make a decision about whether to allow a developer to construct a nine-story 140-unit residential building at 1600 Park Ave., Zoning Board officials said during a four-hour meeting on the subject Tuesday night.
The proposed structure, which would be built on a vacant lot that straddles the Weehawken-Hoboken border, came under fire last year from city residents who fear that the building will only add to the traffic problems in the uptown area.
Not so, says Sanford Weiss, the local developer who has presented a series of proposals over the last three years to develop the land.
“We want to be a part of the solution, not a part of the problem,” said Weiss after Tuesday’s meeting. “Our proposal alleviates traffic in residential areas.”
Over the last three years, Weiss has submitted a series of proposals to the board in an effort to develop the land. Even though zoning ordinances only permit construction in the area for industrial purposes, Weiss seems determined to build a residential structure on the plot. To do so, he needs to convince the board that it is in “the public’s interest” to build his project.
Since 1998 Weiss has been peppering his proposals to build high rises on the spot with community-oriented improvements that he would be willing to pay for if his project is approved.
Was once 24 stories
Originally, Weiss hoped to build a 24-story structure on the site, complete with a handful of traffic improvements that he argued would improve the traffic flow in the area.
But concern about building such a large project sparked outrage among some. In 1999, in an effort to address concerns, Weiss offered an 18-story building with traffic improvements and affordable housing. But public concern still threatened his chances, with the board forcing him to scale down his ambitions even more. Now Weiss is back with a nine-story building, and while there is no more talk of affordable housing, the developer has made traffic improvements the centerpoint of his proposal.
At the root of his proposal is the argument that a residential building will produce less traffic than an industrial or office building would. Weiss has gone a step further and hired a team of traffic engineers to study the problem and make efforts that they believe will improve the traffic flow in the area, provided that construction of the building is approved.
Tuesday night, Joseph Staigar, the chief engineer of the firm hired by Weiss, argued that the project contained two major traffic improvements.
First, it would install a traffic light at 16th Street and Park Avenue, enabling cars traveling west on 16th Street to make a lefthand turn onto Park Avenue faster.
“Currently the service levels there are an F, the worst grade,” said Staigar, in a reference to the grades of service that traffic engineers use to evaluate service levels at intersections. “The lefthand turning delays there…are over a thousand seconds, according to our calculations. And the cue length reaches 87 cars.”
Installing a light would reduce delays there to approximately 30 seconds, he said.
The second traffic improvement Weiss is dangling in front of the board is the promise to grant the city a right of way to construct a road that would connect Park to Willow Avenue. The road would essentially serve as an extension of 17th Street.
“What this does is it allows a third connection between Weehawken and Hoboken,” said Staigar, who noted that a 1989 traffic study commissioned by the city recommended that a so-called “western connector” road be built. A western connector would allow traffic to travel north and south without passing through the more built-up and congested eastern sections of the city, the report argues.
“The missing link [to the western connector] is the applicant’s property,” said Staigar.
Even though the applicant testified about the project for almost the duration of the meeting, the feelings of the board were perhaps best summed up by Dominic Lisa, a longtime board member who scratched his head at about 10:55 p.m. He said, “I don’t get it. Where’s the road?”
Lisa, who is known for his fun-loving ways, wasn’t joking. Even though the applicant was tying his proposal to the merits of the traffic improvements that he planned to include in the project, the board made it clear that they felt he had done an inadequate job of providing critical details about those improvements.
For months, independent engineers, retained by the board, have attempted to wrestle the information out of the applicant with no success, according to board officials. A long letter including 40 pertinent questions about the improvements was still unanswered at the time of the meeting.
Details about the exact area that Weiss was willing to cede to the city were left up in the air. The matter is further complicated by the fact that a road, which is now blocked off, once connected Willow and Park avenues in that general area. Experts for the applicant could do no more than shrug when asked if the same road would be ceded to the city.
Bringing it to light
Issues related to the traffic light at 16th Street and Park Avenue also have yet to be resolved.
“There are issues that still need to be looked at,” said Berge Tombalakian, a physical engineer retained by the board. “We are talking about a very unusual intersection [at 16th and Park]. The bridge over Park provides very limited sight access. If you are coming south over the bridge with those sight levels, we need to know if [a light will make it more likely that] someone will plow into someone else’s rear end.”
In addition to incomplete information about the traffic improvements, the applicant also failed to provide the city’s engineers with crucial information about sewage, water and electric connections.
“We need to know if it is going to be possible to fight a fire in the top of this building,” said Andrew Hipolit, another engineer from the board.
The incomplete information left board attorney Carl Schaefer fuming. “I can’t get an independent report from [the engineers] because they can’t get the information from you,” he said.
John O’Donnell, an attorney representing Weiss, said the information would be provided in time for the board’s meeting on Jan. 16.
In addition to discussion over traffic around the site, plans for the property were laid out in painstaking detail by Bruce Stieve, an associate who works with Hoboken-based Architect Dean Marchetto, the principal designer of the project.
Marchetto has designed a nine-story “C” shaped building with a third-floor view terrace, two levels of parking and 5,655 square feet of retail, Stieve said.
Retail space would front onto 16th Street. Although no tenant for the retail space has been identified yet, Stieve explained that zoning laws would prohibit the applicant from having a restaurant with a customer service area of larger than 784 square feet.
Later in the evening, Staigar argued that it would not be the sort of retail that would generate “new trips” to the area during peak travel times.
“Nobody who lives in Union is going to get in their car at five or six o’clock to come here,” he argued.
The bulk of the evidence that Stieve entered into the record was intended to convince the board that other buildings in the area were of roughly a comparable size to the one Weiss hoped to build. He pointed to the buildings at the Shipyard, which are 125 feet tall, and the Lipton Tea building, which stands approximately 180 feet tall.
Wants a variance
Weiss is asking for a variance that will allow him to build his residential building 125 feet tall even though zoning ordinances restrict height in the area to 80 feet. The buildings at the Shipyard, which are in the process of being built, received a similar variance from the board, while the Lipton Tea building was constructed before the height ordinance was adopted.
Stieve also entered several pictures into the record showing the run-down state of affairs on and near the site. He pointed to several of them, saying that “there is evidence that people may be living under the bridges” that border the property. Later, under cross-examination from an attorney representing residents opposed to the project, he admitted that the pictures were outdated and potentially misleading.
After a few questions from the handful of residents who had sat through the entire meeting – about 40 residents had packed the room when the meeting began – the board adjourned, promising to take the contentious issue up again at the next meeting.