Since the summer, Greenfield Partners, a real estate investment company based in Norwalk, has been working to gain a series of city approvals for a plan that entails 350 rental apartments and nearly 11,000 square feet of ground floor live/work space at 75 Tresser Blvd., the former home of The Advocate.
Members of the URC voted unanimously Thursday to recommend the plan to the Zoning Board after hearing favorable comments from Kip Bergstrom, the URC's executive director, and Daniel Doern, an architectural consultant hired by the commission.
"This is an exciting building that will get talked about," Doern said.
The URC has authority over the designs of projects proposed for the Mill River Corridor, an area roughly bounded by Interstate-95, Mill River Street, Washington Boulevard and the University of Connecticut parking garage.
One question concerning the project was whether it met the commission's design criteria, which encourages high-rises along Washington Boulevard. The regulations call for maximum building heights of 125 feet. But tall structures require a more expensive steel-frame construction that have all but vanished in Stamford since the recession. Developers have instead turned their focus to wood-frame or "stick-built" buildings that typically top out at five stories.
As a result, the plan by Greenfield Partners calls for a roughly five-story building with facades and heights that vary as it wraps around the more residential sections of Tresser Boulevard and Clinton Avenue. Knowing that the city wanted an iconic building on one of its most high-profile corners, the developer proposed incorporating an 86-foot vertical light beacon that would slice through the building on Washington Boulevard.
The concept was similar to that used in a now-defunct residential project on West Park Place that was also under the URC's review. In September 2009, saddled with debt as a result of the housing crash, the developer, Archstone, sold its nearly two-acre plot of land to the city for $5 million. The property is now set to become part of Mill River Park.
Doern had worked on the Archstone project as the company's vice president of development. Now acting as a consultant, he told URC members that the current building similarly "satisfies the spirit" of the Mill River guidelines by achieving "prominence on Washington Boulevard."
In its approval, however, the URC placed a condition that the project should come back for its review should any of its final designs change. Thus far, Greenfield Partners has only submitted a general development plan. The next step would be an application for final site plan approval, which provides a more detailed project layout and usually represents the final step of the zoning process.
During the meeting, Bergstrom said that he believed the Archstone development was "fundamentally going to change the stick product in Stamford," he said, referring to wood-frame construction.
He then added, "I believe the same thing is going to happen with this project."
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