After being in the works many year, projects in the Parkway Area Redevelopment Zone finally seem to be coming to fruition.
The township contains two areas that have been designated as areas in need of redevelopment. The Parkway Avenue Redevelopment Zone includes the site of the former General Motors factory and the old Naval Air Warfare Center—both on Parkway Avenue.
The township’s other redevelopment zone is the business district on Olden Avenue—an effort in which township officials have been making gradual process.
Ewing Observer editor Bill Sanservino recently sat down with Mayor Bert Steinmann to talk about issues impacting the township. In this month’s Q&A resulting from the interview, the mayor discusses the state of projects in the township’s redevelopment zones. A lightly edited version of that Q&A appears below.
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Ewing Observer: Let’s talk about the redevelopment areas in town. There’s the Ewing Town Center and the old Naval Air Warfare Center on Parkway Avenue and the Olden Avenue Redevelopment Zone. Can you give an update on the status of each of them?
Bert Steinmann: Well, Olden Avenue has a little bit more challenges with trying to make improvements, and we are making them. They’re steady, but the only significant changes we can make are when somebody is applying for a permit or when there’s new owners of a business, because we can have a conversation with them.
Unfortunately there are some individuals that own businesses on Olden Avenue who have been there for years and years and years and years. Their thinking is not very progressive in terms of what things look should look like. They think that the old way is the best way. For instance, the car dealerships. Right now they’re starting to change, but before it was Subaru and that was all a sea of flags.
They had all these little flags flying around in the air, and they said, “Oh, that’s what attracts customers to the store.” We told them, “No, it’s not.” The other thing is that they wanted these large billboard-like signs that are like 20 feet up in the air. They said, “That’s what you need to do.” Well people don’t drive with their heads up in the air. They look down on the ground.
So what we’re looking to do is to have ground mounted signs as opposed to those types of signs. Some of the owners are resistant to that. People are also resistant to landscaping, for instance. We had a program where we wound up with some trees from the Scudders Falls Bridge project.
They had taken out a number of trees and they had to replace them. We identified areas in town to plant them and Olden Avenue was one of them. Before we even started it, we heard nothing but negatives. “No, you’re blocking the view of my store. You’re blocking this, you’re blocking that.”
That’s a tougher fight, as opposed to, say, for instance, the Naval Air Warfare Center proportionally or, in this particular case, the town center. We had a lot of input with the Town Center, and it’s turning out the way we envisioned it. Certainly with the help of the company, because they’re very progressive in their thinking also.
The Ewing Town Center has been moving along at a steady pace. They’re supposed to start the steel erection I think next month. If you drive by there now, you’ll see like three towers there, right? Well, two of them, it’s a stairwell and then an elevator shaft. And now the steel’s coming. So you’ll see that building coming up through the summer, and will hopefully be open sometime in the fall. So that is going really well.
EO: Have they started on the front section where the retail is going?
BS: That’s what they’re working on now. And then they’re working on the live-work space (units that have retail on the first floor and a residential unit for the business owners on the second). They’re putting the facade on there now and getting that ready to go. They’ve been fairly busy. The rental housing started to slow down a little bit, but that only lasted for, I would say, a month or a month and a half. They’re really picking up now. They’ve already got tenants for spaces that haven’t been built. There’s a list.
EO: What phase are they on right now?
BS: I think four.
EO: They moved up to phase four already?
BS: Yeah, it’s moving. It’s way ahead of schedule.
EO: When do you anticipate the project will be done?
BS: I anticipate that site to be completely finished in the next three years.
EO: And what was the original timeline?
BS: Seven or eight years.
EO: Okay, so we’re talking maybe about half the time.
BS: Right. I don’t think they even realized the demand. I guess people were looking for a higher end type of an apartment with more amenities. Although the amenities on the site have been a little slower than the apartments. They’re just now opening up the clubhouse and the pool will be open for this summer. So they went a year or so without that.
Some people were already complaining, saying, “Hey, you promised us this.” But again, if you go through there, the clubhouse is really nice and the pool is excellent. It’s coming along. I think some of it has to do with the fact they’re trying to preserve some of the history of the property. So visually the clubhouse is designed like an old industrial type building. They’re very meticulous in the detail.
EO: I understand that the Capital Health Medical Center in Hopewell is helping to drive the demand for some of the housing in that area?
BS: Exactly. You saw the Capital Health expansion throughout this county, and it even crossed into Pennsylvania. I mean, they’re just booming. They’re buying up every place. They have a lot of doctors and nurses and they’re starting to gravitate over there.
BS: What’s going on at the former Naval Air Warfare Center site?
BS: So what they have proposed and what they’ve got approval for is to build is one warehouse—approximately 300,000 square feet—that sits in the back of the property right next to the (Trenton-Mercer) airport. And then they have six smaller warehouses, if you want to call them that. They’re more like storefronts, though.
They’re 20,000 square feet each, but it’s two or three separate buildings. What they’re looking for is a brew pub type thing, a restaurant, a fitness center, a DICK’S Sporting Goods. I’m mentioning names, but those are the types of retailers that they’re trying to go after, whether that’s going to be there or not. Those are the sizes that we’re talking about.
EO: So those 20,000-square-foot spaces are for retail?
BS: Yeah, there’s like one like 120,000-square-foot building sectioned off into 20,000 square foot spaces. And the facade of these particular buildings will kind of mimic what’s being built at the General Motors (Town Center) site. They’re close to the road and they have that urban setting.
EO: So the town has approved it. Does it still need approval from the county and state as well?
BS: No, it’s all been approved. We approved it. The county has approved it. I believe the DNR Canal Commission has approved their plan. They’re ready to move forward. So the next phases are the infrastructure has to be put in—a roundabout and some other things that are going to happen. And then the demolition of the of the buildings.
EO: Is there kind of a bypass road going to the warehouse?
BS: There’s a bypass road that is designed—actually it’s a service road. That road is not contingent on them getting all the approvals, because basically, they presented a traffic study from engineers that they did for the county and for us that said the impact (of the project) doesn’t take anything else away from the intersection at Bear Tavern Road and West Upper Ferry Road.
They are putting in one more turning lane a little bit further back, which includes taking some of our land there. We own a lot, so we have to give up some frontage. And then there was one house that was in question, which was close to that turning lane, and the company negotiated to buy that.
EO: Which intersection is that?
BS: That’s at Grand Avenue, Bear Tavern and West Upper Ferry roads. The one with the With 7-Eleven and Dunkin Donuts.
So anyway, that’s not contingent. So they’re going to move forward to it. We did apply for a grant for putting in that service road. So if we get the grant, we definitely want to put it in because of future expansions anyway.
EO: I would think that some traffic truck traffic going down Bear Tavern Road and making the turn there at that intersection could have some negative impacts.
BS: Yeah, but again, it didn’t change the rating of that intersection. It’s not a great rating now, but it didn’t deteriorate the rating any.
EO: Does that go through a residential area before it gets to the site?.
BS: Yeah. There’s about half a dozen homes. On the one side of the road, you have West Trenton Hardware first, then three or four homes, and then the Firehouse and an empty lot. Then you have the laundromat and pink house that sticks out. That’s the one that they bought. There’s also some houses on the other side.
EO: In some towns in Mercer County—namely Robbinsville and West Windsor—there has been pretty significant opposition to proposed warehouse projects. Have you seen any of that in Ewing?.
BS: No. I mean, there were people that spoke up against it (at planning board hearings), but not like the push back that they had out in West Windsor.
This is an old industrial area that backs up to the airport anyway. You can’t do anything else on this property. You can build these warehouses, some of which are going to be public retail—the ones closest to Parkway Avenue.
And it wasn’t one of these sites where you could put a shopping center in there. Retailers are walking away from big box stores. A lot of people—and I think it will eventually go back to the way it used to be—are shopping online. My wife does. I don’t think there’s a day that goes by that I don’t have some kind of delivery truck at my front door dropping something off. That’s just the times.
Will it go back to actually having retailers? I think it will. I’ll give you a perfect example. For the city. When that was being built, they used to call them row houses. Now they call them condominiums. They’re all attached homes. It’s just a different name, but it’s the same concept.
People went away from that, wanted single family homes, and now they’re going back to that older style home, because they don’t have maintenance and all the other stuff that comes along with it. They have homeowners associations that take care of it, because people don’t want to cut their lawn anymore.
EO: How about environmental issues on that site? I know there was some reports by the state Department of Environmental Protection that said there was some PFAS (a group of highly toxic forever chemicals) that had gotten into the groundwater around the area. I’m sure there’s other contamination there as well that needs to be cleaned up. Where does that stand? Do they have to do some remediation at the site before construction?
EO: Well, interesting that you say that, because if it’s a warehouse, they only have to put a vapor barrier down. They don’t do anything else. They are going to have to keep the monitoring wells that are there, so there are some things that they have to work around.
The Navy does have to have access to that property, because it’s a continual testing type thing. It has improved a little bit. There are some homes that have wells in that area, so they have to be tested. We encourage people to eliminate their wells and go to city water. Everything is being monitored.
A warehouse and retail development has been approved for the for Naval Air Warfare Center site on Parkway Avenue in Ewing. (Wikipedia photo).,
