About 50 people attended a public hearing Tuesday on a plan to replace a burned-down building on Howe Avenue in downtown Shelton.
Not one of them had anything bad to say about the project.
The proposal — a five-story building with restaurants, offices, shops, and 24 one-bedroom apartments — would replace the building leveled during a January 2014 fire.
The fire displaced about 30 people but thankfully did not result in any serious injuries.
The proposal involves a land swap between the city and the property’s owners so that Bridge Street could be widened. That widening is needed, planners say, to accommodate future development in the area — including the possible relocation of Shelton City Hall.
Most of the .41-acre property sits much as it did about a month after the blaze, with a chain-link fence cordoning off a pit where the building’s basement used to be, full of dirt, glass, bricks, and cement chunks.
The property is owned by Ralph Matto, a local builder. His son, Joseph, an architect, designed the new building, called the “Phoenix Towers.”
Overview
Most of the previous building became rubble after the fire, but two restaurants — Liquid Lunch (which is rebranding as GROW, a farm-to-table bistro) and Joy Lee — are still standing.
The new building would be constructed around those remaining businesses, with an arcade walkway connecting that space to three new ground-floor retail spots.
Article continues after video of Joseph Matto giving an overview of the new building during Tuesday’s hearing.
Matto said at Tuesday’s hearing that Starbucks had initially been interested in taking up one of those spots.
“They were real excited about doing it, but they decided they wanted a drive-thru, and I said ‘I’m not changing the drawings again,’” he said.
He said he envisions some type of coffee shop or similar business in the space.
“There used to be five stores all accessible from Howe Avenue,” he told the planning and zoning commission. “Now what I’m envisioning is basically a wall of glass where people are sitting at tables, and there’s this really nice connection between people inside having their coffee and sandwich or whatever it is and what’s going on outside.”
Above the restaurants and shops would be a floor of office space. The building would be topped out by three floors of eight one-bedroom apartments each. The apartments would be served by a parking lot restricted to residents behind the building.
Matto said the apartments would be about 750 square feet, slightly bigger than the one-bedroom apartments at the nearby Avalon Shelton on Canal Street, where rents run about $1,400 a month. The rent for Matto’s apartments wasn’t discussed.
Land Swap, City Plans
Dominick Thomas, the lawyer representing the Mattos, said Matto presented new plans for the building informally to the Downtown Subcommittee of the Planning and Zoning Commission about a year ago. They’ve been fine-tuning them since to accommodate the city’s plans for future development in the area.
As it relates to the Matto project, the Mattos have agreed to give up about 20 feet of the property along Bridge Street so the city can widen it and extend it through to Coram Avenue.
In return, the city will give the Mattos an equal amount of space from an abutting property it owns off Coram Avenue where a public parking lot currently sits.
Click play on the video below to see Joseph Matto talking about the land swap.
The city is also negotiating to purchase neighboring properties with a view to possibly relocating City Hall from its current home in a former school building on Hill Street, but no decisions have been made yet.
Click here to read more from a previous story about that process, and downtown redevelopments plans in general.
At Tuesday’s hearing Thomas called the final plans for the Matto building “a very good example of a public-private partnership” between the Mattos and the city.
“This project had to be ‘incorporatible’ with what the city was contemplating for a public area in what is the main central block of downtown,” Thomas said.
“It’s not only the Matto building rising from the ashes, but the first step toward the transformation of the central block of (the) downtown area into a model of public space surrounded by successful development,” Thomas said.
The lawyer said the mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly project matches a trend in city planning, “new urbanism,” which emphasizes walkable neighborhoods with a mix of property uses.
Thomas said that “new urbanism” isn’t so new in the Valley.
“For someone like me … it’s the way I grew up in the Valley,” the lawyer, who grew up on Derby’s Olivia Street, said. “We lived in mixed-use neighborhoods, we walked around the corner, we went to stores, we had retail on the bottom and housing on top.”
Public Comment
Three residents spoke during the public comment portion of Tuesday’s hearing, and they all said they support the project.
Barbara McDermott, president of the tenants’ association at The Ripton, an apartment building which sits cater-cornered across Howe Avenue to the Matto property, said “it’s great to have a building that’s going to finally be built on that spot.”
McDermott offered the only comments that came close to criticism of the project when she asked that the Mattos consider having a small convenience store for a tenant in the new building, since only 10 people who live in The Ripton drive regularly.
Susan Pavlik, who lives in the Birmingham building on Canal Street, was happy to see the pedestrian-friendly nature of the plans.
“One of the main reasons that I bought the unit down in the Birmingham is that it is so close to the downtown,” she said. “I don’t have to take my car out, and to me that’s the essence of city living.”
Bette Lynn Paez, a New Street resident, said the new building could help spur a downtown rebirth.
“I remember the BF Goodrich fire in the 70s, and out of those ashes came the Riverwalk and Inline Plastics,” she said. “So out of these ashes, I’m really happy to see a real renaissance for downtown.”
The planning and zoning commission voted unanimously to close the public hearing Tuesday, but did not vote to approve the project itself, which will be discussed and fine-tuned at subsequent PZC meetings.
Article continues after document.
Reaction
Joseph Matto said in an email Wednesday that he and his family are delighted with the reception the plans have gotten so far.
If approved, construction would take between 10 and 24 months.
“It’s been a long haul getting to this point but we are grateful for such a positive relationship with the Zoning Board and the mayor and especially the expert guidance of Rick Schultz, the zoning enforcement officer,” Matto said, also praising Jason Williams, a consultant hired by the city to explore downtown redevelopment options. “The final design of our building is significantly better as a result of this collaboration, and I hope we laid some tracks for others to follow in the continued development and transformation of the Shelton downtown area.”
The land swap involved in the development proposal is a perfect example of that collaboration, he said, which will result in a net gain of parking spaces.
“But it’s not just about the number of parking spaces. It’s about how the downtown ‘feels’ to people, and how the built environment subtly encourages customers to stop their cars, park, get out and actually go into the stores and be patrons on a recurring basis,” Matto said. “This is what we have accomplished. The effects of this new reorganizing may not be immediately apparent but in time the growth of businesses will prove out the theories.”
