A 27-story apartment tower will rise on Christopher Columbus Drive and Warren Street Downtown by 2001. This might not be an unusual story in light of the luxury high rises sprouting like crabgrass all along the river. But it will be the first of two phases for a massive office and shopping arcade in an interior area that is building up away from the waterfront.
The buildings will occupy a site from which a charter school plans to move. The school will relocate to 100 Monitor St.
Jersey City developer Joseph Panepinto has spearheaded the project, and he won unanimous approval at Tuesday’s Planning Board meeting for phase I of the Christopher Columbus Towers plan.
“If we present a product that’s quality for residential and a corresponding office building, we’ll attract tenants,” said Panepinto after the meeting Tuesday.
The week before last, the board approved a redevelopment plan that would bring down the majority of a block at Newark Avenue and Grove Street, directly across the street from the PATH. The board also may entertain plans for a 22- to 26- story office tower on that block. A community group has continued to negotiate with the developer over that project.
Christopher Columbus Towers will include a 27-story, 306 unit luxury apartment building , with 23,000 square feet of ground floor retail and 306 parking spaces. It would come in the area between Exchange Place and Grove Street, long a high-rise desert.
Phase II of the project would make room for 1.1 million square feet of office space in a separate tower connected to the base and 60,000 square feet of commercial space. A long-closed PATH entrance would be opened and incorporated into the building, according to Panepinto, and a movie theater is also a possibility. The second phase will be pitched sometime in the near future, and would likely not be built until 2003-04, Panepinto said. The developer envisions a tenant of the new towers waking up in the morning, taking the elevator down to the ground floor shopping area, strolling by stores and eventually hopping the Grove Street PATH, all without leaving the complex.
Panepinto said construction on the residential towers could start sometime in July.
The construction of the building would necessitate the move of Community Charter School. The charter school on Warren Street is slated to move to a site at 100 Monitor St. in Lafayette. Some members of the Lafayette community had opposed that move, which was approved by the Jersey City Redevelopment Agency this summer, and are challenging the request for proposal the city put out for the site. The city and the JCRA contend that the city did nothing improper in putting out the proposals.