Developer Forest City Residential Inc. last week unveiled plans for what New Rochelle Mayor Noam Bramson called “the most significant project in the city”™s modern history.”
Bramson and a representative from Forest City laid out details for the Echo Bay development project during an interview with the Business Journal, and later publicly at a meeting of the City Council.
Development of Echo Bay, an old industrial area, has been discussed since 2002, when the city hired a consulting firm to conduct a redevelopment study of the area. In December 2006, Forest City Residential was chosen as developer for the project after the city sent out RFP”™s for the project.
Forest City formally laid out plans last week for a mixed-use development on 20 acres of waterfront that would include 600 luxury apartments, 100,000 square feet of small-shop retail, 62 waterfront town homes and 42 condominiums. The project would also include a 15,000-square-foot community building, which would replace the old Armory building.
The $450 million estimated price tag on the project would be financed through a public/private partnership, though Bramson said that the “great majority of the cost” would be borne by Forest City.
Forest City Residential development manager Abe Naparstek said the project also calls for preserving five acres of the area for open space, in the form of three public parks.
He said there would likely be an “exhaustive remediation” process at the site, with an estimated cost of $20 million for environmental cleanup.
Naparstek is hopeful the company can receive funding from the state”™s Brownfield Redevelopment program, which was recently criticized by Gov. Eliot Spitzer for occasionally providing money to developers who are performing very little environmental cleanup on a site.
However, Bramson believes the Echo Bay project “is exactly the kind of project the Brownfields program was intended for.”
Naparstek said none of the buildings would exceed five stories, and buildings on the water would be limited to three stories.
He believes the Echo Bay project, which is expected to break ground in 2010 or ”™11, fits in with downtown development already happening in New Rochelle.
He said the combined effects of the recently completed Trump Plaza and Avalon Bay residential buildings, the proposed LeCount Square project and the Echo Bay project will have a “transformative impact” on the city.
“This will be a much more walkable community in a few years,” Naparstek said. “We are very bullish on the direction downtown is headed.”
He said 20 percent of the 600 apartments would be designated for affordable housing, which would be defined as 50 percent of the average median household income for the region.
He said the buildings would likely be built to LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) specifications.
“It”™s a more effective way to build buildings,” he said.
Perhaps the most contentious part of the project is the plan to tear down the current Armory building and build a new community center to replace it.
Though making an adaptive reuse of the Armory was discussed in a prior master plan for the Echo Bay development, Bramson said it is not economically feasible to repair the building.
“It was our natural inclination to keep the building,” he said of the Armory, constructed in 1932, but doing so would have cost millions of dollars in repairs.
The mayor acknowledged there will be a segment of the city populace opposed to losing the Armory, but he said leaders of several civic and veterans associations support the current proposal, including David Hall, president of the United Veterans Memorial and Patriotic Association, who said it is not practical to save the building.
“This new community center will provide necessary meeting space for veterans groups and other community associations,” Bramson said.
He said every effort will be made to preserve the spirit of the old Armory in the new building, including restoring murals that exist in the current building and moving them to the new one.
The project now must go through a lengthy series of environmental reviews and public hearings.
