Like many New Yorkers, Jonathan Barton fled the city during the pandemic in search of a “little breathing room” and eventually settled down with his family in Llewelyn Park.
He was aware of the two-story building at 172 Main Street that sits along his property line and peeks over his fence like a nosey neighbor. But it never struck him as a cause for concern.
“It never crossed our minds that someone would make it bigger,” Barton said.
Nevertheless, the Planning Board last week approved West Orange-based developer Maurice Cox’s proposal to build an additional story on the building, despite local zoning laws allowing only buildings with two and a half stories on this block of Main Street. Soon, it will loom over Barton’s backyard.
Cox, whose company Cox RE Holdings is headquartered at 109 Main Street, has grand plans for the Main Street corridor and he is not shy about saying it. “I’m going to buy everything that is available on Main Street and help Main Street change,” said Cox, who was born in West Orange.
It is refreshing to hear a developer express interest in West Orange’s downtown corridor, especially since Matrix’s plans to build a movie studio is still uncertain. However, Cox believes there is an anti-development culture in the township that he will have to overcome.
“Unfortunately this culture of stopping development in West Orange — I’m not with it,” Cox said. “We’re coming here and we’re going to fight the good battle of making West Orange modern and new. We’re not going to be happy with 1919 homes.”
Barton disagrees with that characterization. He told our publication that he doesn’t mind that the building is being renovated, only that the developer is asking for a variance to build an additional floor.
Barton and his neighbors banded together to hire a professional planner Peter Steck to testify against the project, but the application still passed. Only Councilwoman Sue Scarpa voted against the project.
The building at 172 Main Street is “unusual,” Steck said. Built in the 1970s, it’s a modern office building wedged into a row of historic homes, where Thomas Edison’s factory workers used to live. It defies the design standards laid out in the township’s Master Plan, Steck added.
“If you look at the design standards, you’re supposed to have a building that is up to the street to have pedestrian traffic,” Steck said.
Steck also claimed that the developer should have requested another variance for having a building against the rear property line. All of this points to a building that shouldn’t exist, let alone made even larger, he claimed.
The culture of anti-development — if that is, in fact, what it is — is rooted in an impression in the Oranges that the profits developers make happen at the expense of residents. Street parking is becoming more cumbersome, taxes are rising, and the schools are growing more crowded. On the same Planning Board agenda that Cox’s project appeared, was an application to build a temporary one-story school building next to Mount Pleasant Elementary School, and it was approved.
Downtown residents living along Park Drive recently organized to prevent another developer, Moshe Sugar, from constructing a three-story apartment building at 410 Main Street. It was not development they were opposed to, per se; it was overdevelopment — the act of squeezing too much into a small lot. Sugar’s proposal required eight variances that neighbors held up as evidence the project didn’t belong there.
If Cox is going to fulfill his ambitions of remaking downtown West Orange, these are the concerns he will have to address. However, Barton said at the Planning Board that he had invited Cox to his Edgehill Road home this year to discuss the Main Street project, but Cox didn’t seem to “have any concern for my concerns.”
Meanwhile, Barton and his neighbors are still mulling whether to challenge the Planning Board’s decision in court, but he knows legal action can be costly. Although Llewellyn Park is one of the town’s wealthiest addresses in West Orange, Barton joked that not all who reside there are “gazillionaires.”
“It’s not the end of the world, but it’s upsetting to us,” Barton said. “This is our nest egg.”
