DANBERRY – City leaders welcomed plans to convert a long-running storage yard on the West Side into a Mercedes-Benz dealership, but had questions about traffic and the project’s unusual design for the car showroom on the second floor and car storage on the deck.
“It’s a little unusual, but well, there’s going to be a second floor and a roof, I think, with cars mostly there, I suppose,” City Councilor Paul Rutello said at a public hearing this week. “Explain to me because I’m a little confused – there will be a roof over cars and then a covered section for people to stand in to look at which cars will have another roof over that?”
Developer representatives said that the short answer is yes.
Most of the second floor of the proposed agency at Merry Brook and Sugar Hollow Road will be an exposed deck finished with a 6-foot wall of dark metallic panels and “European-style” insulation. Part of the second floor at the front of the building will be a glass covered interior display area for the car, to attract the attention of Route 7.
“What we really want to do is make it look like a completed building and not just a parking lot with a guardrail,” Michael Kozlowski, project executive for Claris Construction, said during a planning committee hearing on Wednesday. “It’s really hard to see any cars (in the parking lot) from the street.”
Kozlowski was referring to a plan by Cary Automotive to convert a 2.5-acre storage yard at a gate junction on the booming West Side of Danbury into a $7 million luxury car dealership. Curry, which has 12 locations in four states including a Mercedes-Benz dealership in Danbury’s east end, will move its federal road agent to the west side if it receives planning commission approval.
The site, adjacent to Danbury Municipal Airport, is at the heart of an emerging “high-end motoring mecca” that already houses luxury-goods dealerships, custom garages and storage facilities, and a $450,000 sports car manufacturer.
“[The site]has been in use for a long time in a variety of commercial and industrial uses with questionable zoning compliance, and it has recently been used to store raw materials as well as to store construction equipment,” Curry Automotive attorney Meaghan told the planning committee this week. “It’s a very appropriate use of the area – being both transportation-centric and commercial – especially when it comes to car sales…and that fits right in.”
The planning committee won’t decide until at least June, when the hearing to review the impact of traffic on the area will continue. The dealer will be a “major traffic generator,” Danbury traffic engineer Abdul Muhammed said, adding 860 vehicle trips to the area on an average weekday and an average of 1,615 car and truck trips on Saturday.
Several city leaders attended Wednesday’s hearing to get answers for their constituents, only to find out that a traffic study would be discussed in June.
“Quite a few voters have called me and I want to know this or that,” City Councilman Fred Visconti said, adding that he was pleased with the prospect that the “chaos” at the intersection of Mary Brook and Sugar Hollow had been rehabilitated. “We are looking forward to having Mercedes-Benz there, but I have a few questions about the traffic.”
For its part, Curry Automotive said it was confident that traffic wouldn’t disrupt deals.
“This project will maintain acceptable levels of service with minimal increases in vehicle delays at all peak hours,” attorney Miles said this week. “It’s not necessary to make off-road improvements.”
Meanwhile, Rotello said it was not sold in rooftop parking lots.
“We have constituents atop Wooster Heights who live several hundred feet above this (proposed agent) and I assume that[the rooftop cars]would be visible from this vantage point,” Rotello said. “I would like to take what can be seen from several hundred feet high – you don’t need to ride planes flying over the building – the people who are going to live there are going to look down the hill and see this building from a viewpoint that is clearly not from the street.”
“I would argue that just for the distance, the front of this building will check most of those cars on the roof,” said Kozlowski, the project’s executive director. “If you’re high enough, of course you’ll see something on the roof, but at that vantage point, it’s no different to the cars on the roof because they’re looking at the cars on the parking deck, in my opinion.”
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