|
Credit: Photo Courtesy of EDAW/DIXI Carrillo
Design firm EDAW revitalized this
streetscape in “the Corner” district at
the University of Virginia.
|
A plan to breathe new energy into the Livingston campus and create market-rate and affordable housing in Piscataway is gathering steam after a series of open forums.
College Town will be a vibrant community designed with “smart growth” principles featuring retail shops, university space and green spaces to encourage outdoor gathering and preserve wetlands. Housing for undergraduate and graduate students, faculty and staff, and Piscataway residents will provide College Town with a 24-hour buzz.
The collaborative project includes participation from Rutgers, the Middlesex County Improvement Authority and the township of Piscataway and has been in the works for nearly two years. Rutgers will lease the 44-acre parcel to a developer who will build units and maintain tenants there. Still, there is much planning to be done after a final report is issued, scheduled for March.
“We have an awful lot of details to work through,” said Karen Kavanagh, executive vice president for administrative affairs. “There are financing issues, programmatic issues ... I can’t give a definitive timeline” for its completion. Kavanagh added that long-planned improvements to the Livingston Student Center would go forth at the same time as College Town.
The proposed site is home to the former Camp Kilmer, a staging area used by the U.S. War Department during World War II and the Korean War to send troops to New York and out to Europe and Asia. It also was used as a reception area for Hungarian immigrants in the mid-1950s. The Army closed the base in 1995.
Now the site is home to a few parking lots, a day care center and the Livingston Theater Company building, which houses the Edison Papers and the Stanton Anthony Papers.
With 350 student housing units, 230 market rate units and 80 affordable housing units,
the project will satisfy both a pressing need for more student housing at Rutgers as well as the township of Piscataway’s requirement by the state to build affordable housing units. Gus Sara, president of the Livingston College Governing Association, said that many students believed the residential mix would be beneficial. “This is the kind of thing we [at Livingston] stand for – helping the community, trying to bring the community together, respecting diversity and things of that nature.”
The proposed 40,000 square feet of retail space could include clothing stores, convenience shops and coffeehouses, while 50,000 square feet of university space may consist of a theater and classroom space. “The idea is kind of a living-learning community,” Kavanagh said. “It will be closely associated to the academic programs and yet be a center for academic and residential life.” More than 2,000 people will live in College Town at its full capacity. Some will live in apartments above retail storefronts; others will be able to rent townhouses. And planners are counting on College Town to be an attraction for sports fans after leaving the Louis Brown Athletic Center or returning to nearby parking lots.
Livingston College Dean Arnold Hyndman said the College Town project will fulfill his campus’ need for a sense of community. “There has been a need for students, faculty and staff of the Livingston college community to have the kind of connection to a broader community for a long time.” The proposed elements of College Town “have been really important missing elements for the campus, which to a significant degree has been a campus somewhat cut off and isolated.”
The development will proceed with the surrounding environment in mind. Its design will be more conducive to bicycle and pedestrian traffic, and structures will be built to maximize sun and wind patterns. An existing section of wetlands will provide some protection against flooding and, where possible, green roof technology will be utilized. The developers will aim to preserve mature trees that have been on site for decades.
An open forum was held last month at the Livingston Student Center, where students, alumni, faculty and staff pitched suggestions and aired complaints. Several attendees expressed concern that planned improvements to the Livingston Student Center would be stalled once again because of the College Town development.
Sara cautioned that College Town should not divert attention from the student center expansion. “The student center itself stands for much more,” Sara said. “This has been a sixteen year struggle and we’re just looking for equity. We’re trying to encourage simultaneous planning between the student center and College Town.”
|
