The southeast side of Newark’s Ironbound is heavily industrial. On Wheeler Point Road, where the Pulaski Highway crosses over freight train tracks, there are still scrap yards and factories. Every few minutes, a diesel truck appears, chuffing exhaust into the air.
Around the corner on Avenue I is what might be Newark’s worst illegal dumping site.
Needless to say, this is an unlikely location for an apartment building. But recently, a seven-story, 295-unit apartment building at 253-275 Delancey Street was approved by the Planning Board.
“This is an industrial area,” said the longtime owner of one of the factories on Delancey Street, who asked to remain anonymous. “Between the trucks, the trains, and the planes, who’d want to live there?”
The building also stands out for its size. It’s the kind of building you would expect in a city’s downtown, not on the industrial fringes. “It’s admittedly a large project,” said the architect Noel Musial during the hearing.
Development has been a touchy subject in the Ironbound of late. City officials tend to side with developers in wanting taller and denser buildings. But it is the residents that have to deal with the daily headache from congestion.
“The zoning in that particular area, it’s one to three stories, so why are they building a seven-story building within that area?” asked Tanisha Garner, president of Homes for All Newark.
In the past few years, the largest buildings in the Ironbound were built within redevelopment zones that allow developers to sidestep local zoning laws.
This development is no different – it is located in the Dayton Street Redevelopment Zone, which the City Council passed in 2020, though the boundaries have been extended since then. As an indication of how elected officials tend to support these measures, it passed unanimously at the City Council. So did the legislation that allowed 30-story towers at the old Iberia site.
However, Calvin Souder, the developer’s lawyer, has a different take. He argued at the Planning Board hearing that an apartment building at this site, currently used as a scrapyard and a parking lot for construction equipment, would improve the neighborhood by deindustrializing it.
“Rather than have more 18-wheelers using the site to sit industrial goods on, it will have people living there, which will significantly clean up the area,” Souder said.
Souder also touted the design of the building, which includes a rooftop garden. “I challenge folks to find a development in our city where you have a garden in the middle of the project that you can walk from one floor to the next utilizing a landscaped walkway,” he said.
Although the immediate surroundings of the property are industrial, if you walk two blocks north, the neighborhood starts to look like a typical one. A well-known Portuguese steakhouse Preguinho is always packed. But even here, residents are feeling squeezed by development.
The proposed building on Delancey Street, despite having 295 units, has a parking garage that only accommodates 150 cars. There is very little public transportation near here. It is likely that tenants will have to rely on street parking in an already burdened neighborhood.
Angel Guardia, an 82-year-old resident of Gotthardt Street, said that on his street, a one-family home and a factory were replaced with multi-unit dwellings. This is a microcosm of what is happening all over. It goes to show that no matter where a person lives in the Ironbound, street parking is an issue.
“You can’t park around here – they are making a lot of houses,” said Guardia, pointing to a car that was parked in a crosswalk. “That’s supposed to be for people to walk – people don’t respect anything.”
