Thomas Breen file photo
The former Doyle's dry cleaners at 203 Alden Ave.
The redeveloper of the former Doyle’s Cleaners on Alden Avenue has ditched plans to build a new specialty food store and will now construct six, instead of four, apartments there instead.
The Board of Zoning Appeals (BZA) unanimously signed off on that rebuilding-plan changeup during its most recent monthly online meeting last Tuesday.
The commissioners approved a variance to permit 2,388 square feet of lot area per dwelling unit where 3,500 square feet is required for the construction of six new dwelling units at 203 Alden Ave.
That 0.23-acre plot is home to the long-shuttered former Doyle’s dry cleaners.
The owner, a holding company controlled by Alden Avenue neighbor Alan Tuchmann, won permission from the zoning board last September to tear down the ex-Doyle’s building and construct four new townhouses with an attached neighborhood convenience store. He received that approval despite pushback from some neighbors around too dense development and too many convenience stores.
At Tuesday’s BZA meeting, local attorney Ben Trachten, representing Tuchmann’s company, said that his client is now pursuing an “all-residential proposal after taking the neighborhood’s concerns into account” around not wanting another food-selling shop in the area. “We figure an all-residential development is the more appropriate way to go.”
Trachten said that the project is otherwise the same, and is not seeking any further dimensional or bulk zoning relief on top of what the zoning board granted last year. The only substantive change is an increase of the number of residential dwelling units from the previously approved four to the newly proposed six. With this six-apartment project, Trachten stressed, the “prior approval of neighborhood convenience use will be abandoned in favor of a purely residential development.”
Plans for 203 Alden rebuild.
In response to neighbors’ concerns about environmental contamination at the former dry cleaners site, Tuchmann said that his professional background has included cleaning up Superfund sites and managing the disposal of waste coming out of Yale New Haven Hospital.
“All of the asbestos has been abated according to federal and state regulations,” he said about the cleanup of 203 Alden.
The last environmental remediation that needs to be done is the removal of an underground storage tank and the removal of “a specific amount of soil,” to be followed by the taking down of the existing building and construction of six new dwelling units.
Tuchmann said that he currently lives right next door, and that he intends to move into and live in one of the six new dwelling units at 203 Alden once he finishes building them.
“This site has been a blight on the neighborhood for decades,” added Trachten, noting that he lives nearby and used to get his dry cleaning done at Doyle’s 15 years ago. “It really needs to be cleaned up,” and Tuchmann promises to do just that.
Fellow Westville resident Dennis Serfilippi spoke up during the public testimony section of Tuesday’s meeting with concerns about the “precedent” this zoning-relief request might set for the neighborhood. “What is the right density? Why is so much density needed here?” He described a general “relaxing of the hardship and zoning rules on sort of a case by case basis. … I’m not sure that’s the way you solve [the housing crisis], one unit at a time.”
Trachten said that every zoning application is reviewed individually and no precedent will be set with this 203 Alden request. “Every parcel poses its own development challenges. This parcel posed significant development challenges because of its environmental history” and because of the additional lot area that cleaved off from Tuchmann’s other property, at 197 Alden, to make this 203 Alden project possible.
“This is a beautifully designed project: the material choices, the architecture,” Trachten concluded. “This is not a very quick and dirty cheap building. This is going to be Alan’s home.”
Now that the project has won another round of BZA approval, it must go before the City Plan Commission for a full site plan review before Tuchmann’s company can begin construction.