The old town garage site which is in the process of being remediated due to gasoline and dry cleaning contaminants is the perfect place for a new garage if it is deemed needed. It is in the center of town baking it useful to employees, shoppers, diners and commuters. Franklin Avenue is in desperate need of a makeover. It is a wide much used street and could fit in quite nicely. In 2008 aproposal was made to put in apartments over some shops and a garage with a small park ( trees and a bench or two) on the Franklin Avenue side. At the time the developer would have done the cleanup.
Tanks have been removed already There is 900,000 dollars in the budget for cleanup and the DEP is coming in March to test soils in the area
It is now 2017, we are doing the remaining cleanup and could own the entire area with minimum difficulty. Now we have an asset and would be in control of how we develop it. An enviable position to be in and a much better spot than the Hudson Street location which is a narrow street, across from a church and could have a negative impact on small businesses in the area. I see the sign every day as I drive up Franklin and it says ” Town Garage”! can the message be any clearer?
Hudson street was better location. Who wants to park on Franklin and get killed crossing the street or park on top of hazardous waste? The last VM and council came close to making the garage a reality and voters rejected it in the end, thanks to people who want to control every aspect of the project; location, number of stories, how many inches onto the street. Ridiculous. Now the same people want to come back with new proposals to waste more of our money. Forget it folks. That ship has sailed.
Are you willing to fund it?
I would still hate to see a multiple story garage in this spot. Anybody knows how many spots it can fit on the ground level after removing the old building?
I’ve been saying the same thing for years. The last thing we need in that area is apartments or a stepdown retirement facility. There would probably have to be a No Left Turn sign onto Franklin to prevent accidents and if it were ignored, that could be a problem. But Hudson Street has never been an appropriate spot for shopping/dining parking and has many related issues, some of which the poster has named.
Only problem. We own Hudson street lot we would have to but that property.
Oh 11:31 don’t think that silly things like actual facts will get in the way of fake news based opinions. Once it’s on Facebook it must be true! Anyone that’s been here more than a week and a half (Fragrance-guy obviously not in this category) will know that there was another process that we went through only about a decade ago that ended with another small group of people laying down in the path of actual public benefit. What is old is new. Meet the new boss…
Tim, the Hudson street design you support was already voted down in a binding vote.
Let them Eat Cake at Sooks..then walk it off like the locals..would do those visitors a world of good to get their bones moving uphill to their street parking spots..locasl enjoy the walk..let’s share that part of Ridgewood,s
Walk it off healthy culture..oh but the merchants say that won’t fill their coffers..Boo Hoo..present a fabulous meal and customer event..people walk to experience that..elders can be dropped off at the event or valet options are here as well.Garazilla is not the answer…
A decade or so ago, the Ridgewood village tried, via an arguably aggressive application of eminent domain principles, simply to take by forced sale the property upon which the “Ridgewood Garage” building stands. This was hot on the heels of the controversial U.S. Supreme Court decision which, in order to find lawful the use by a Connecticut municipality of eminent domain to boot ordinary fee simple owners of residential properties in an “underperforming” (ahem!) neigborhood to make room for a proposed factory that mysteriously never got built, conveniently expanded the scope of the word “public” in the U.S. Constitution’s term “public use” to include a scheme that, at its heart, was nothing but a naked multistep attempt to eventually boost property tax revenue. The idea at the time was that the new U.S Supreme Court constitutional precedent rendered legitimate any property condemnation scheme that municipal powerbrokers could rig together that gave off the faintest whiff of a public benefit in the distant future, regardless of the immediately applicable common law rights of the owner of the targeted property or properties. One presumes the now battle-hardened owners of the Franklin Avenue parcel under discussion have been waiting to receive, at long last, a decent offer from the Village to purchase the lot that does not involve the coercion inherent in the use of the municipsl eminent domain power. Can it fairly be said that that particular lot, or, more broadly, that the “parking lottish” parts of the larger block defined by Ridgewood Avenue, Oak Street, Franklin Avenue and Walnut Street, is “blighted” to such a degree as to justify municipal action to use the eminent domain power to initiate a process by which it is redeveloped into a modern parking facility? The decision that was eventually taken years ago was that, despite the fact that the Village had already raised some $15 million via a corresponding municipal bond issuance to build a parking garage, the village would nevertheless relent, and not follow through on its threats to use its eminent domain power. We’ve since spent the proceeds of that bond issuance on other priorities. Unfortunately, we are still paying off the debt for a parking garage that, for good or ill, was never built.