A five-story apartment building with retail space on the ground floor is planned for the corner of East Main Street and McDermott Avenue in downtown Riverhead.
The developer laid out some details of the project before the Riverhead Industrial Agency yesterday, describing five stories of upscale apartments that will offer sweeping views of the Peconic River and bring foot traffic to downtown stores.
“The challenge is to reestablish Riverhead as a pedestrian-oriented promenade-type town with some really beautiful apartments,” said architect Geoffrey Freeman.
The building will occupy the 27,500-square-foot lot at the corner of McDermott Avenue and East Main Street, where a parking lot and vacant building currently are today. Once the home of McCabe’s office products, the building has been empty since the Dinosaur Walk Museum closed in 2008. It would be torn down to make way for a five-story building, with apartments on the upper four floors and retail space on the ground floor.
Though most of the units will be affordable housing, the developer plans to design the building and the apartments inside to be “just as good as any market-rate housing on the East End.”
“One of the first things he told us is that they don’t want to build a building that looks like affordable housing,” Freeman said.
“We’re going to look to make it as high area median income, if not market-rate, as possible,” said Georgica Green president David Gallo. “We think some of the views are going to be absolutely incredible. I’d like to keep a unit for myself.”
The building would house 94 or 96 apartments. Studios, one bedroom and two bedroom units would all be available.
An experienced affordable housing developer, Gallo plans to utilize a number of different funding resources and grants to offset the costs of the $33 million project. Those funding sources will likely require a certain percentage of the apartments to be priced affordably.
“We’re proud that we can deliver [$33 million] to this corner of Main Street,” Gallo said, “to what’s going to be a really, really incredible building.”
In addition to the upper four floors of apartments, there will be about 7,000 square feet of retail space on the ground floor. Some of those stores may be facing the rear parking lot and the river. “We have an opportunity to capture the combination of Main Street and the river and the boardwalk,” Freeman said. “For years, they’ve been segregated. The river was always sort of the back end of the town.”
“We want to get people down there and see the entire downtonw, not just East Main Street,” Gallo said.
He also plans to provide 45 parking spaces on the lower level of the building, which will be available on a first-come, first-serve basis for the apartment’s residents.
Because the building is in the downtown parking district and will pay taxes toward the maintenance of the downtown parking lots, it is not actually required to provide any parking at all. Overflow from the parking stalls beneath the apartments will be available in the riverfront parking.
Georgica Green plans to ask for standard IDA benefits, including mortgage recording tax and sales tax exemptions. A project in another town was able to save more than $1 million in material costs because of an IDA sales tax exemption.
“We couldn’t build projects as nice as we like to build them without things like that,” Gallo said.
Georgica Green will submit its full application to the IDA within the next four to six weeks, and then a public hearing will be scheduled.
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