Speaking at a groundbreaking ceremony on a vast, empty expanse of concrete and broken asphalt on the Sleepy Hollow riverfront, New Jersey developer Jonathan Stein recalled the long history of a mixed-use development that will start there this spring and whose completion, at a cost of $800 million to $1 billion, might still be a decade away.
“It”™s been an extraordinary ride,” the regional developer told an audience of public officials, local residents and business people gathered on the 67-acre site of the former General Motors automotive plant, where the last Chevrolet minivan rolled off the assembly line in 1996. Two years after the plant closing, GM officials approached Stein, then a partner at Roseland Property Co. in Short Hills, N.J., about developing the site.
“That was 1998,” said Stein, who later founded Diversified Realty Advisors LLC, the Summit, N.J., company partnering in a joint venture with SunCal, a national developer of large-scale master-planned communities, to redevelop the General Motors property, a short distance north of the Tappan Zee bridge construction, as a transit-oriented community named Edge-on-Hudson. “The site looked exactly like it does today,” he said, an observation that drew laughter from the crowd.
Stein”™s company was chosen for the project over some prominent metropolitan developers and in 2001, a contract between the Detroit automaker and the developer was publicly announced, he recalled. Gov. George Pataki that year took part in a groundbreaking on the razed site off Beekman Avenue for a project then called Lighthouse Landing, a tribute to the inactive county-owned lighthouse on the site that Stein at the May 18 ceremony called “the lynchpin of our development.”
Fifteen years ago, “I said to my partners, ”˜No problem, two years, we”™ll be in the ground,”™” Stein recalled. “I was a little off on timing.”
The project was delayed for several years by lawsuits brought against the village of Sleepy Hollow by GM and the bordering village of Tarrytown, the credit market crisis that brought commercial development to a standstill in Westchester, the recession and GM”™s bankruptcy reorganization. Roseland parted ways with General Motors on the project in late 2007, noting at the time that Sleepy Hollow officials in their environmental review had scaled back the proposed development “to the point where it became economically unviable for our company.”
Tarrytown officials in 2011 petitioned a state court to annul its municipal neighbor”™s approval of the Lighthouse Landing plan, claiming Sleepy Hollow did not take a “hard look” at the project”™s impact on traffic and parking and did not thoroughly review alternative proposals. But a state judge, citing in detail the project”™s “lengthy and contentious” planning approval process, in 2012 rejected Tarrytown”™s claims.
General Motors in 2012 issued another request for proposals from developers. Stein said the company reached out to him to see if he wanted to again participate in the project with his new company. In 2013, the automaker completed an environmental cleanup of the industrially contaminated site. In 2014, the joint venture of Diversified Realty and SunCal purchased the site for $39.5 million.
When fully built, Edge-on-Hudson will include 1,177 condominiums, townhouses and rental apartments; a 140-room boutique hotel that will be the first hotel in Sleepy Hollow; 135,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space and 30,000 square feet of office space; about 16 acres of parkland for public use and a riverfront promenade connecting the Westchester Riverwalk and Kingsland Point Park, which abuts the northern end of the site.
“This is not going to be a gated community,” Peter Johnson, executive vice president at SunCal, said at the groundbreaking. “We see this as bringing the waterfront back to the community and bringing the community back to the river.”
The developers have begun building a temporary bridge for the construction project on Beekman Avenue, where the development”™s main entrance will be. That work is expected to be completed in about three weeks, after which workers will begin demolishing the auto plant”™s concrete and asphalt slab and import fill material to the site. Johnson said utilities ”” water and sewer lines and electrical service ”” should be installed by fall. The first residences will begin to rise in 2017 and should open in 2018, he said.
Stein said the partners have obtained construction financing from Centennial Bank. He and Johnson did not have first-phase costs available. No general contractor has yet been selected for the project.
Designed by Hart Howerton, the New York City architectural and design firm, 306 housing units will be built in Edge-on-Hudson”™s first phase, including 61 units of affordable senior and workforce housing. A four-story Loft District, with architectural details evoking the region”™s industrial heritage, will include 188 loft-style apartments. Initial construction also will include 46 three-story and four-story condominiums for sale and 72 townhouses in a Central Park District.
“It”™s a development site,” said Hart Howerton CEO Jim Tinson, “but we”™re not creating an isolated development project. It”™s a place that”™s going to bring people together.”
Johnson said the total development will cost $800 million to $1 billion. The full buildout will be completed in four or five phases. “We”™re looking somewhere in the 8- to 10-year range” for completion, he said.
Over the years of planning and delays, Stein said, “The market has grown” for Edge-on-Hudson because of migration from Manhattan by residents facing high housing and living costs. “Our market, which we thought was going to be the local Westchester market, we now think is going to be more of a regional draw,” he said. “We”™ve differentiated the market so we would hit different price points” with the mix of condos, lofts and townhouses.
For Sleepy Hollow Mayor Kenneth Wray, “An enormous sense of relief right now is what we feel,” he said at the ceremonial groundbreaking. “So, finally, here we are. It”™s been a long, long wait.”
“This is a defining moment for our village, a real turning point,” Wray said.
“We”™re not here just for a groundbreaking, but really to break with our industrial past and move into the 21st century,” the mayor said.
