Coaster Photo
A parking garage and residential units are planned on Kingsley Street near the Empress Hotel in Asbury Park.
By CAROL GORGA WILLIAMS
Asbury Park City Council members seem poised to refer a proposal by Asbury Partners LLC to the Planning Board for its review and potential approval for a multi-level parking garage and residential unit project adjacent to the Empress Hotel on the oceanfront.
The Empress Hotel would not be affected by the development.
The council, acting as the city’s redevelopment agency, gets first look at development proposals in the designated areas and then must vote whether or not to send the proposals to the Planning Board for review. That referral is pending but expected, given that council members had no objections to the proposal,
The specifics for this plan involve building at 320 Asbury Ave. and 110 First Ave., according to the applicant’s attorney, Jenifer Phillips Smith of Gibbons PC., a Newark-based law firm.
It involves a four-story parking garage, with 454 parking spaces, 236 rental residential units, 15,000-square-feet of ground-floor commercial uses and a pedestrian plaza at the tip of the triangle with Cookman and Asbury avenues.
Some 300 parking spaces would be available for public use. In the first proposal at First, Kingley and Asbury Avenues, 89 residential units would be wrapped around the parking garage, in an effort to conceal it, said Frank Minervini, an architect with MVMK Architecture in Hoboken. The site plan calls for six cisterns for stormwater management but rather than hiding them, they will become a focal point, he said. The state Department of Environmental Protection has ultimate jurisdiction over the placement, design and inclusion of the cisterns, however.
This building will be just west of The Empress and involves use of the hotel’s surface parking lot which will be converted into a structured parking garage.
The second proposal on 1.94 acres at Asbury and Cookman avenues would feature 236 parking spaces and 156 residential units in four stories of residential use and two stories of parking.
The proposal also will involve special LED writing effects to help the developments blend with the area. An elevated sidewalk would be built on Cookman to comply with flooding mitigation regulations.
