(Credit: Steve Thurston, 2022)
Larry Novik, with Bonacio Construction, talks about the phases of development in the Downtown Revitalization Initiative in Glens Falls. He spoke during a presentation at Crandall Library June 13, 2022.
Parking may still be the bugaboo in the Downtown Revitalization Initiative along South Street in Glens Falls.
The first questions people had after Mayor Bill Collins and others presented the full plan for the DRI to the community at Crandall Library on Monday June 13 were about parking, but now, there might not be enough of it. At the same time, officials said the city may be changing enough to no longer need it.
Herb Levin, watching from the back, saw images of the Market Center planned for South Street, a pavilion to be used as a farmers market on weekends, and wondered where elderly people would park. There were none shown nearby.
Another woman asked the mayor to think about the needs of caterers and others who need to drop off and clean up. People with small families might want parking that is closer to the space, a person in the crowd of about 60 said.
These questions came after the mayor explained that he was taking a step back and listening to people about the parking situation. He told those gathered that the plans they were seeing were still not complete and that a parking study would help determine what was best.
But officials with Bonacio Construction, the company that will renovate old buildings and create new ones in that stretch of the city pointed toward an entirely new model, one focused on walking and mass transit.
“These buildings that we're looking at are going to be the most efficient buildings that'll be going up in the whole nation," said the architect Scott Townsend. He was referring to a planned complex of three connected buildings that stretch between Elm and South streets, a complex that at least one person in the audience thought was a bit too big.
Although the planned building is long and is taller than those directly adjacent, they do follow current code, he had said in his presentation.
"Over time, there's going to be less cars and there’s going to be more mass transit,” he said.
Bonacio's Larry Novik agreed.
"I think that one of the key things that we can do, is to move people back into a walking, urban downtown kind of setting, a more dense model,” Novik said, adding that it was a model where fewer cars are needed as people walk to work, shopping and dining.
He said that when Bonacio first attempted condominiums in the Saratoga Springs area, they created two parking spaces per unit but pared that back to one as they found buyers only needed one car.
"We see the success in the model," he said.
In other portions of the presentation, officials said:
Glens Falls has earmarked $5 million for the planned market building on South Street and parking structure somewhere in the downtown area; $1.2 million toward development of the corner of South and Elm streets, money that will subsidize Bonacio Construction’s renovation of two buildings on Elm; and $1.4 million for streetscape and infrastructure in the area of Elm and South streets. The city has earmarked or spent $600,000 on the SUNY Adirondack culinary arts program on Hudson Ave.
[Read our extensive coverage of the Downtown Revitalization Initiative here.]
Collins said that much of the rest of downtown has seen economic growth, and he cited development at the Queensbury Hotel; construction of 14 Hudson apartments; The Mill apartments; renovation of the former First National Bank building into the Worksmart shared work space; and the multi-million dollar ongoing renovation of the Glens Falls National Bank and Trust Company headquarters on Glen Street.
He included restaurants from Davidson Brothers’ Brewery to Raul’s and the Gourmet Cafe. So much of the development in downtown has happened in the past 10 years, but not on South Street.
South Street “is no longer the ‘Street of Dreams’,” the mayor said, referring to its long-time nickname. “Fortunately, it's not where the story ends."