BRONX KILL CONNECTION
PROCESS
Here are paraphrased some of the "choicer" exchanges from the November 26 Planning Board meeting, revolving around the applicant's inexplicable attempt to expand the protected station house building by half its 45-foot depth, building a new back wall 22.5 feet to the rear of the existing one, and putting a fast food restaurant between the two - plans which were scrapped with another submission of drawings presented at the next meeting a week later - thanks apparently to one observant Montclair citizen. The video is available, here.
__________________
Langen Engineering now comes early in the proceedings introducing a more "subtle" change than the one they just aired - "possibly requiring a little more explanation"...
They get right to the point:
LANGEN: "In the footprint of theee.. restaurant space: the footprint itself has not changed whatsoever. So it's the same 7667 square feet. [But the area of the building is only 5250.] In trying to clarify and do some of our homework on making sure that we had consistency amongst all the numbers - both in the parking reports and in our site plans - what we found was that that space where what we now think of as the Pig and Prince is actually only a portion of that footprint. So there's a demising wall where there's this... large footprint of approximately seventy-six hundred square feet. The pig and Prince comprises approximately 5000 square feet of that. So there's been an additional portion umm, which has... ummm, which will be occupied - which has to be accommodated in the parking demand calculations. What we've done is identified an 1800 square foot portion of that footprint to be dedicated to, uh, what we're calling a fast food restaurant."
In other words, they are adding an additional 1800' fast food restaurant with 72 seats to the approximately five thousand feet of the existing Pig and Prince, in a building that only has 5250 square feet of space. (approximate - my estimate)
Concurrently Langen's representative is pointing out with a special pointing device particulars of the "restaurant footprint" - which means: building footprint - including a mysterious "demised wall" - this on a profusely marked-up and illegible projected drawing having no outline or indication of the instant station building on it! ...with this all couched, as it turns out, in their professed need to have more accurate measurements for purposes of parking compliance - the newly discovered eighteen hundred feet of space suddenly materialized in a building of about five thousand being nothing special.
It all comes down to a station building/restaurant footprint dichotomy - which terms in Langen's use are synonymous - as with the architect from a different firm, who uses the same illegible drawing as well, to describe the same changes later in the same meeting.
An 1800-square-foot portion of the building has now been "identified", and is referred to as having been "found". It is to be used for a fast food restaurant, says the representative, while appearing to be pointing with the special pointer to a representation of something called a "demising wall" (a wall that separates properties, such as rental units) which doesn't exist in the drawing.