Moving at a comparatively swift pace of review for large-scale redevelopment projects in Westchester, the White Plains Common Council has approved a national developer”™s plan for a $275 million redevelopment of the largely vacant Westchester Pavilion property on South Broadway.
The council”™s unanimous support for the mixed-use project came less than three years after the owner of the downtown property first publicly aired an ambitious proposal to transform what the city”™s mayor called “an underutilized and underperforming site.”
“This is a tremendous project,” Mayor Thomas M. Roach said at the Feb. 1 meeting of the White Plains Common Council, which unanimously approved a site plan and special permits to allow outdoor dining at 60 S. Broadway, where a nearly 858,000-square-foot, twin-towered commercial and residential development will be built over the next three years and employ an estimated 2,895 construction workers.
The developer, Broadway and Maple Holdings LLC, is an affiliate of Lennar Corp., a publicly traded real estate development and management company headquartered in Miami. The White Plains project is led by the diversified company”™s Lennar Multifamily Communities LLC in Virginia.
In a deal between the city and private developer that is the first of its kind in White Plains, Lennar will pay a $2.33 million fee in lieu of providing additional parkland for the 1,400 new residents the project is expected to attract. The recreation and parks impact fee will be paid in three installments and will be used solely to enhance existing city parks and playgrounds or create new ones, according to a spokeswoman for the mayor”™s office.
Lennar last year partnered on the project with the owner of the 185,000-square-foot Westchester Pavilion shopping mall, Urstadt Biddle Properties Inc. in Greenwich. Urstadt Biddle in 2002 paid $39.9 million for the former Alexander”™s department store building and 4-acre parcel at 60 S. Broadway. Since the Great Recession, the enclosed mall has largely been reduced to an empty shell of retail and restaurant space with the loss of anchor tenants, including Borders Books & Music and Toys R Us/Babies R Us, and smaller businesses.
The building”™s last remaining tenant, Hudson Gateway Association of Realtors, expects to move its headquarters in April to The Source at White Plains retail building at 1 Maple Ave.
Willing L. Biddle, president and CEO of Urstadt Biddle Properties, in May 2013 presented conceptual plans to the White Plains Common Council to replace the antiquated and tenant-depleted commercial building with a “24-hour community” of apartment dwellers, retail, restaurant, health club and spa customers, office workers and hotel guests.
Like Urstadt Biddle”™s initial proposal, Lennar”™s approved site plan calls for the development of approximately 858,000 square feet of space. The developer dropped the owner”™s initial concept for a 180-room hotel and increased the number of apartments to be built from 550 to 707.
Designed by Perkins Eastman Architects P.C., the Lennar project includes two 24-story, 280-foot residential towers with 707 rental units. Forty-three units, or 6 percent of the total, will be affordably priced for tenants earning 60 percent of Westchester”™s area median income for households. City officials said those units will include three studios, 22 one-bedroom, 15 two-bedroom and 3 three-bedroom apartments.
The residential towers will be built on top of 93,840 square feet of commercial space fronting South Broadway and Maple Avenue. The commercial construction will include 77,340 square feet of retail space and 16,500 square feet of restaurant space, of which 1,800 square feet will be used for six outdoor dining venues.
City officials said the redeveloped site will include about 30,000 square feet of open space accessible to the public. That includes a 7,200-square-foot plaza fronting on South Broadway from which pedestrians will enter the residential towers. The plaza will have outdoor restaurant seating.
Before the Common Council vote, Roach said the Lennar project “brings us an opportunity to bring a large number of new neighbors who are downtown. They will help revitalize our downtown. They will use the streets. They will create the atmosphere we all love about our downtown.”
Councilwoman Milagros Lecuona praised the developer”™s team for readily cooperating with her and other city officials seeking changes and additions to the project design. Lennar”™s four-level underground parking garage, which will provide more than 1,000 parking spaces, should be a model for other developers, she said.
“That”™s the way it should be done,” Lecuona said. “Then you leave the space above ground for people and leave the cars below ground.”
With green roofs to reduce stormwater runoff, street landscaping and energy-efficient features, “This project has so many good initiatives that it”™s going to be kind of a role model for other projects,” Lecuona said.
Councilwoman Nadine Hunt-Robinson, an attorney in private practice in White Plains, urged city officials and the developer at the start of the project to draft a community benefit plan that in part would ensure that minority-owned and women-owned businesses in the city “become involved and have our opportunities” in the $275 million project.
Roach and council members said the project will create a more walkable Maple Avenue and connect by foot the Bloomingdale Road commercial area with the heart of downtown. “We have a node of retail and activity that has basically been separated from the rest of our downtown area,” extending from the Crowne Plaza hotel on Hale Avenue to Bloomingdale”™s and Whole Foods on Bloomingdale Road, the mayor said.
For pedestrians, “Maple is a real challenge” with its steep grade, restricted sidewalk areas and high-speed traffic, Roach said. “Pedestrians have subliminally gotten a message that they don”™t belong there; this is car territory.”
Lennar will address that by building a series of small terraced plazas along Maple and Hale avenues that will contain benches, seat walls and landscaping.
“I joke that it”™s like climbing Mount Everest,” Roach said of the redesigned, pedestrian-friendly Maple Avenue. “There are base stations where you can stop and gather yourself.”
“From the train station all the way down to Bloomingdale”™s, we want to feel like this is a walkable city, because it”™s going to raise our reputation in the larger community, bring more investment here, bring more people here,” Roach said.
