Next Big Thing in Wood-Ridge
03.12.2011, 15:50
A TRENDY, large but human-scaled "New Urbanism" development is to begin rising this fall in Wood-Ridge, an unpretentious town of 7,600 people in southern Bergen County.
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Wood-Ridge is a densely settled community and the development will cover 80 acres, prompting the question: Where will they put it? The answer: in an old parking lot, a vast expanse of rutted asphalt and weeds used now to store tractor trailers.
In World War II the lot served an adjacent factory, the Curtiss-Wright aeronautical plant that made engines for B-29 bombers, including the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The factory was immense, a single building under a roof that spread over 32 acres. The workforce included many women, Rosie the Riveters who worked in shifts around the clock.
The building continues in use today, in seemingly good repair, serving mostly as a warehouse for companies like Springfield Precision Instruments, which makes thermometers, and DeLonghi, an Italian manufacturer of appliances and housewares.
The building will remain in use. In fact, it is to be expanded, vertically, with additional structures added atop the roof, which was built of concrete, super-strong to withstand enemy attack.
Celebrity designer
Given the history of the place, the new development, whose first phase has just won borough approval, might seem strange. Its chief designer is a hotshot, internationally celebrated architect, Andres Duany, whose home base is in Miami.
He and his partner and wife, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, met as undergraduates at Princeton's school of architecture and went on to study together at Yale. They made their reputations 25 years ago with a community called Seaside, in Florida's northwestern Panhandle.
It did not look like anything built in America since the 19th century. It looked, in fact, like a set for the play "Our Town," with Victorian houses close together, lots of gingerbread and picket fences and front porches, with shallow front yards and back yards, rear-facing garages reached through alleys. Seaside was a commercial and aesthetic success, visited by development professionals looking for the Next Big Thing.
Five years ago the Curtiss-Wright property and some additional land, 152 acres in all, were sold to a New York-based developer, Rubin Schron, for $51 million. He saw an opportunity to build something more interesting than the usual suburban development. He and Ralph Zucker, president of a Schron subsidiary called Somerset Development, contacted Andres Duany, who came to the site and was captivated. What did he see in this industrial relic?
First thing he saw was the rail line that ran along the western edge of the tract. This was NJ Transit's Bergen Line, which carried commuters from Northwest Bergen to the PATH terminal in Hoboken, where they boarded trains to Lower Manhattan. The Bergen Line has since been connected as well to the new Secaucus Junction rail transfer station, providing a ride to Midtown Manhattan. The line had stations in Garfield, north of Wood-Ridge, and in Rutherford, south of it, but none in Wood-Ridge.
Duany started with that. He would build a station in Wood-Ridge, like the historic Mission-style station in Ridgewood farther north, but better, he said, across the tracks from a new town center, which would have a ceremonial tower and an open plaza for public events. There would be a variety of homes, all within walking distance of the station and town center, which would have stores and offices.
Local input
Duany did not impose designs on a community, take it or leave it. His method was instead to solicit residents' input and to modify plans accordingly, on the spot, in a process called a charrette, an intensive, collaborative architectural effort. So he rented a meeting room at a local hotel for a week and, with the assistance of Ralph Rosenberg and Susan DiGiacomo, Hasbrouck Heights architects, he presented his concepts and invited comment.
Some 150 residents showed up, and they had lots of ideas. As they considered town houses or a parking garage or street-lighting fixtures, the planners would draw pictures showing how these amenities would look, prompting further comment, leading to revised drawings.
The plan that was ultimately reached envisions 737 residential units, increasing the borough's population by a third. The development, on 80 acres, will be called Wesmont Station. It will include a new public middle school, two baseball fields, a running track, and a field for football and soccer. The school, to be built by the developer, will be financed with property taxes paid by Wesmont Station. The athletic facilities and rail station will be provided free of charge to the borough.
There will be paths for pedestrians and bicyclists, with bridges over roadways. Cars will be parked in communal underground garages or, as in Seaside, in backyard family garages that drivers will reach through alleys.
Of the residential units, 217 will be single-family houses, 135 rental apartments, 131 condos, 77 condos for seniors, 166 town houses and 11 work-live spaces for artists and craftsmen. Prices and rents have not been announced, nor can I find any mention of state-required affordable housing.
However, the developer is planning a memorial at the town center to the 6,000 Rosie the Riveters who worked at Curtiss-Wright, with a bronze statue of Rosie as indelibly conceived by Norman Rockwell in a Saturday Evening Post cover in 1943.