P&Z to Mrs. Green’s: Do Better with the Shopping Carts

Planning officials are calling for Mrs. Green’s to do a better job of corralling disused shopping carts and to create a plan for less conspicuous cart storage.

Officials from the market on Pine and Park Streets at Tuesday’s Planning and Zoning Commission meeting proposed installing a designated, outdoor “cart storage” area along the eastern edge of the store (along Park, just opposite the St. A’s parking lot). The area would be largely enclosed by shrubbery and would sit on pavers on a pervious sand or peat-gravel bed, architect David Ball said.

Mrs. Green’s wants to make official its default shopping cart storage area here. It was not part of the original site plans. Credit: Michael Dinan

It would be “a small area surrounded by shrubbery so that they’re not really visible from the street, and only as you’re entering the building would you be able to see the carts,” Ball said at the P&Z meeting, held in the Sturgess Room at the New Canaan Nature Center’s Visitors Center.

The carts right now are being lined up in that very area, though that arrangement wasn’t part of the original site plan.

P&Z commissioner Dan Radman raised concerns about Mrs. Green’s proposal, saying, “Quite frankly, I’m not a fan of those carts outside at all.”

“No offense, but it should have been on the original site plan,” he said. “To have this wart on the building externally, on one of the most prominent buildings in town, would be God awful.”

Though Mrs. Green’s officials have assured P&Z that a proposed, shrubbery-enclosed corral for shopping carts would be largely inconspicuous, the commission has called for a smaller footprint in the plan. Credit: Michael Dinan

From the Mrs. Green’s side, Matt Taylor—identified by Ball as director of design and construction—said the market originally had intended to store its carts inside, but then “looked at what product offerings needed to be in New Canaan” and installed a refrigerator “where we were going to do inside storage.”

“It was an afterthought, but if we do store carts where they are, with a landscape buffer, it is not really that offensive,” Taylor said.

Commissioner Tony Shizari noted that even if the carts are stored indoors, there’s still a problem where customers of Mrs. Green’s—which has very limited off-street parking (about 26 spaces in an underground garage)—leave their carts wherever their cars are parked.

Taylor said: “We can police better.”

The default shopping cart storage area at Mrs. Green’s on Wednesday May 28 had the carts in three rows, including on the grass at Park and Pine Streets. Credit: Michael Dinan

The proposed outdoor cart storage area would be wide enough to accommodate two rows of carts (there are three rows there now, with some carts encroaching on the grass there), and would not require a prominent tree on the property to come down, Mrs. Green’s officials said.

After a discussion of how other New Canaan markets also must fetch disused carts from parking areas—though in the case of Food Emporium and Walter Stewart’s those are off-street lots—P&Z Commission Secretary Jean Grzelecki, who was running the meeting in the absence of Chairman Laszlo Papp (he’s overseas) suggested Mrs. Green’s put together a plan that reduces the footprint of the outdoor cart storage plan.

Since opening in mid-April, Mrs. Green’s has addressed concerns about its lack of a plan for employee and customer parking.