Signs of new life on Spring Garden
Office building first project under HRM by Design
By CHRIS LAMBIE Business Editor
Tue, Sep 21 - 6:42 AM
Halifax developer Danny Chedrawe is planning to build a new $10-million office building on Spring Garden Road.
The four-storey structure is slated for the northeast corner of the Birmingham Street intersection.
"We have a national tenant lined up and we’re very excited," Chedrawe, the president of Westwood Developments Ltd., said Monday.
"It’s probably the first major project on Spring Garden Road in over 20 years."
The project will be built in the space now occupied by Sock it to Ya and Furs & Leathers by Seymour.
The office building will be "one of the very first projects under HRM by Design," Chedrawe said.
"Everybody’s been going to the suburbs — to Bayers Lake and Burnside and Dartmouth Crossing — so now we’re trying to put more focus on the downtown."
The ground floor of the new building will house "a national retailer, which will be announced in the next few months," he said.
Meanwhile, Halifax is poised to put out a request for proposals for what it sees as a key downtown property on Clyde Street beside Queen Street. It is the easternmost of two city-owned parking lots on Clyde.
"The city owns the Clyde Street lots and we’re going to develop them and use the proceeds to pay for the new library," Andy Fillmore, the municipality’s manager of urban design, said in a recent interview.
"It falls beautifully into this Capital Ideas proposal that we took to council in the summertime that says to council, use your public lands to do development which creates economic activity . . . inspires private sector investment . . . and fills in vacant lots that are an eyesore."
The municipality’s other Clyde Street parking lot will be up for grabs later, followed by the site of the former Halifax Infirmary on Queen Street, which lies south of the land destined to house the new $55-million library.
"In the (request for proposals), it invites proposals for different ownership-lease models, and we’re going to choose whichever one is the most advantageous for the city," Fillmore said. "Probably it will be a sale."
There is no schedule for when the other two publicly owned sites will be offered to developers, he said.
"The other two sites will follow once we get this one rolling. One approach is that if we get one project going on this one site, it will actually increase the value of the other sites. So we don’t want to do them all at once. It’s shrewd to get one project rolling and then that will make the other sites more desirable to build on and therefore increase our return."
Fillmore said he would like to see "haute-designed, mixed-use development" on the Clyde Street property.
"We’re looking for a little bit of modernity in the city."
The ground floor will be primarily commercial retail, Fillmore said.
"The Clyde Street frontage can get away from straight-on retail and has an option to go to live/work. Those are almost like town-home units, where you can live and run your business in the same place."
Heights on the project are restricted to 27.6 metres.
"You can get quite a bit of development on that site," Fillmore said.
"There are some good massing rules that help it to respect the transition to Schmidtville, to the south, which is a two- and three-storey historic neighbourhood."
The project, which will hold hundreds of residential units, will be set back 3.6 metres from the sidewalk on Clyde, with a double row of trees on the sidewalk.
"So it’s really going to make sort of like a pedestrian boulevard between Victoria Park and the new park that will get built to the south of the library site," Fillmore said.
(
clambie@herald.ca)
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