Planning Board to review plans for Midtown Parking Deck
BY LINDA MOSS
moss@montclairlocal.news
The Township Planning Board is scheduled next week to review plans for the Midtown Parking Deck, a four-story facility with 315 parking spaces that will replace an existing municipal surface lot.
The deck will be built as part of the Seymour Street redevelopment plan, a mixed-use project slated for a site adjacent to the Wellmont Theater.
The Township Council has asked the planning board to review plans for the new deck, which will be constructed on municipal land, the existing metered Midtown Parking Plaza, on Glenridge Avenue. The deck is a capital improvement, and as such doesn't need the planning board's approval, but the council wants input from the board.
The planning board will hear a presentation on the new deck at its meeting this Monday, Oct. 30. The facility will replace 56 metered spaces and 129 regular parking spaces, as well as create 130 additional spaces, for a total of 315.
Building the deck is the responsibility of the Seymour Street redevelopers, which are Pinnacle Cos. of Montclair and Brookfield Properties of Manhattan.
The core of the Seymour project is a 3.5-acre site on Bloomfield Avenue, where two buildings and a large public plaza will be constructed. One building will be six stories, with 200 residential units, 232 parking spaces and roughly 30,000 square feet of retail space. The second building, seven stories tall, has two stories of office space and five floors of parking.
In her Oct. 24 report to the planning board on the Midtown Deck, Township Planner Janice Talley said that it will have two separate driveways, one an entrance and one an exit. It will also have a staircase at its northeast corner adjacent to Glenridge Avenue and one at the southwestern corner near an alley that connects the deck to Bloomfield Avenue.
There is a pocket park proposed for the western corner of the deck area, and "art panels are proposed on the upper level of the facade facing Glenridge Avenue," according to Talley.
An art panel is also proposed along that same facade between the deck's first and second stories, and "three large art panels are proposed along the stair tower at the northwestern corner of the building," Talley said in her report.
Under the Seymour Street redevelopment plan all its parking facilities must have at least two charging stations and "the infrastructure to support additional car-charging facliities," according to Talley.