A $15,000 contract has been awarded to do a study of an old and abandoned two-story research facility in Joe Palaia Park in Ocean Township in hopes the building may be rehabilitated and used in the future.
Last week the Township Council passed a resolution awarding a professional services contract to CME Associates, based in Howell, to provide a structural engineering review of the building at a cost not to exceed $15,231.
“We are doing the study to see what condition the building is in and see what can do with it in the future. It will be a structural and environmental study to give us a scope of what we might do with the building to make it useful,” Mayor Christopher Siciliano said.
He said early ideas for using the building include a storage facility for township records and recreational uses.
“But who knows?” he said.
Built around 1921 after AT&T took control of the test site from the U.S. Army Signal Corps, the large, two-story building, with kitchen facilities, housed laboratories and personnel involved in testing electronics and communications equipment. The building was later used by the township’s Board of Education but has been vacant for several decades.
The building, with an orange terra-cotta roof, is set back in the test site off of Whalepond Road near Elizabeth Street.
Siciliano said the township would seek grant money to possibly rehabilitate it.
