Elm City Industrial Properties, Inc.
What the warehouses would look like from South Wallace Street.
A plan to fill in the long-vacant block bounded by Chapel Street, Ives Place,and East and Wallace streets with two large warehouses has received unanimous approval from the City Plan Commission.
After receiving a warm reception at the Downtown Wooster Square Community Management team, the plan, featuring warehouses that might become a storing-loading-and distributing hub for a large retailer like Amazon, coasted to approval after a few friendly questions from commissioners.
The project’s lawyer, James Perito of Halloran Sage, architect Jim Riley, engineer Jim Rotondo, and property owner Richard Cuomo were on hand for the regular Zoom meeting of the commission this past Wednesday evening, along with some 40 other participants for the night’s long agenda.
Click here for a previous story with details on prospective routes of the servicing trucks as they move around the neighborhood and get on and off of I‑91 and I‑95 and Route 1.
The 4.4‑acre site gets its address from the last tenant, the H.B. Ives company, which was a casualty of the 2008 – 2009 Great Recession. Click here to read an article about how that factory got to be built there during the tenure of Mayor Dick Lee, and about its demise.
Future tenants of the two roughly 44,000 square-foot warehouses are not known; names like Home Depot and Amazon have been thrown around. The number of trucks navigating in and out is still hypothetical. Still, Commissioner Adam Marchand pressed for an estimate of degree of the new truck traffic that might appear in the neighborhood.
“I think overall during the day about 27 trips, which is pretty modest,” Perito replied.
Commission Vice-Chair Leslie Radcliffe wanted to know if the warehouses have one or two levels and whether they could potentially be subdivided so there may turn out to be a lot of tenants and lot more trucks and potentially vehicular density added.
“The warehouse area is 32 feet clear inside,” answered Cuomo, “with no multiple stories. Tiypically my tenants have racking systems.”
But couldn’t you partition to suit a host of different tenants? Radcliffe pressed Cuomo.
“I would think a building of this size you subdivide at most for two tenants.”
Radcliffe continued to speculate that whether two or 20 tenants, she conceded the location of the building with its “easy on and off the highway is ideal.”
Commissioner Elias Estabrook commended the plan for its entrance and exits of trucks on the East Street side and he especially is looking forward, he said, to the deployment of mural art by local artists, promised by the developers, to liven up the facade facing Chapel Street.
Perito said the warehouse team had also sent the plan to the Fair Haven Community Management team with a request to make presentation about the plan at the next available meeting.
Is this area not almost all brownfields?? What is the remediation plan?