For years, developer Pedro Gomes has dreamed of putting a high-rise on Orange Street. In a career that has churned out 1,000 new apartments, building a tower is the one thing that has eluded him.
Last month, his first high-rise building at 253 Orange Street, named Christiano after his son, received Zoning Board approval. Building at this location, which he calls a gateway to Newark with its position along the interstate highway, is a statement about both the neighborhood’s transformation and his career ambitions.
“This intersection is what everyone sees when they come from West Orange and Livingston coming into Newark, and going back home, or going into the city, or jumping on the highway,” Gomes said.
The approval is even sweeter after Gomes’s initial attempt to build a high-rise on a lot at 250 Orange Street got thwarted by the Zoning Board two times in 2023. The first denial was for a 15-story building; six months later, another denial came for a 12-story project on the same lot.
Last year, during a tour of the neighborhood, Gomes admitted the situation upset him, not just the denial, but seeing other developers get towers approved that still haven’t been built. The site of the demolished Bears Stadium still sits abandoned despite the City Council approving a tax abatement in 2022 to build an 18-story tower there. Meanwhile, Gomes said he has a proven track record of putting shovels in the ground.
“I can tell you 50 projects that were approved, and they’re not going to break ground – look at Bear’s Stadium,” he told Jersey Digs last year. “Every piece of land that doesn’t have a shovel in it means it’s not being brought to life.”
In the end, Gomes did build a smaller version — six stories tall — of that project at 250 Orange Street, but hearing Gomes speak about that project last year, it sounded like he had unfinished business.
Since then, however, nearby Hoyt Tower, one of Tona Development’s latest projects, opened in 2024. The building, at 15 stories tall and 203 units, came up during the meeting and served as a counterpoint to Gomes’s proposed 14-story-tall building.
“This project does fit the community, it is appropriate, it is not out of line,” Gomes said. “A dominant, prominent building should be built there — that’s exactly what we’re doing.”
Working in Gomes’s favor was that the Broad Street Station District redevelopment plan, passed in 2009, appears to call for a statement building on that particular corner, according to project architect Noel Musial, principal of his namesake firm.
“In reading the Broad Street Station District redevelopment plan, we saw that this particular parcel, this property, was highlighted in pages 78-79 of the plan as a powerful marker, an entryway with important visibility from Branch Brook Park and the on-off ramps from Interstate 280,” Musial said.
Designed by the architects at Musial Group, his longtime collaborator, this building is arguably his best design to date and is heavily inspired by the modernist Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Colonnade, one block away.
One thing modernist buildings do so well is play with light and shadow. This is a cue Musial took to heart: his building’s concrete facade has pronounced mullions, similar to the Colonnade, and the angles and recesses “pick up the light of the sun and glisten and have different characteristics during different times of the day and the seasons.” The building’s vertical piers, dark-green pigment, and Flatiron-shaped footprint are a departure from the cookie-cutter four-over-two buildings sprouting up around the city.
“Its height does present itself as a landmark within the city,” Musial said.
