The city of Passaic is exploring a redevelopment plan for a 6-acre industrial park on Market Street that would yield hundreds of new apartments and a new parking deck. During the city council meeting held on April 14, council members introduced an ordinance allowing the owners of the Big Apple West warehouse complex to build up to 490 apartments and a parking garage for up to 640 cars.
A recent report in NorthJersey.com said that officials introduced the ordinance to amend the city’s Eastside Redevelopment Plan to allow residential use at the industrial park located at 177 and 187 Passaic Street.
While Passaic Mayor Hector Lora said the plan is in the very early stages, the report said the owners of Big Apple West, Jordan and Michael Plachter, are considering tearing down six buildings to make way for three new ones. One of the proposed buildings would span 5 or 6 stories and include only apartments, while the other two would be developed to include street-level commercial space.
Both parcels are located less than a block from U.S. Route 21 and along one of Passaic’s commercial corridors. The 400,000-square-foot Contempo Plaza shopping center is across the street from the two parcels, while the former Ethan Allen furniture warehouse and office at 1 Market Street is south of them.
The two mixed-use apartments would front Passaic and Market streets, while the third residential building would be located south of them. The shift from industrial to residential and retail use would mark a significant new direction for the site, which has a history of serving the city’s manufacturing industry dating back to the 1800s.
The property housed Reid and Barry commercial dryers in 1869, but it was repurposed as a rubber plant operated by U.S. Rubber around 1900. Uniroyal, the successor to U.S. Rubber, remained in the warehouse until 1973, when the factory closed and laid off 1,100 employees. Uniroyal then sold the warehouse complex to Truck Industries four years later.
A March 1984 New York Times report states that the entire complex was sold to New York real estate developer Alex Parker for about $1 million.
Parker, who once owned the former Times building at 1 Times Square in Manhattan, intended to invest an additional $1 million to refurbish the warehouses and add office space. He also intended to tie up an old riverboat on a small canal at the property that would serve as a restaurant and lounge, and to convert a 7,700-square-foot building into a “songwriters’ hall of fame and a commercial station.”
Records from the Passaic County Tax Board indicate that the site in the proposal consists of two lots, including a parking lot and the warehouses. The warehouses were erected in 1934 and last sold in 2000 to the current owner, who paid $595,000 for both parcels. The lots have a combined assessed value of approximately $5.9 million, which is less than the assessed value at the time of sale 26 years ago ($6,070,000).
While the redevelopment plan for the two parcels could present significant new investment for the city, which has not had many developments of this size in recent years, the parcels are not the only site in the area that developers have tried to repurpose recently. Jersey Digs reported in 2020 that a limited liability company known as Market Street TIC I attempted to redevelop the warehouse at 1 Market Street into a 251-unit residential building with 257 parking spaces.
