Business

Parking, Traffic Concerns Arise as Forest St. Construction Nears

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As the start of a major construction project along the narrow, one-way stretch of Forest Street draws near, planning officials are urging those in charge to coordinate and communicate with police and merchants on matters of parking and traffic. Construction will start this summer of a three-story mixed residential-and-retail complex at 21 Forest St. The project will see two commercial spaces, seven residential units, a pocket park and 48-space parking lot go in where The Farmer’s Table (now across the street), Forest Street Deli and a long-vacant parking lot have been located for years. The street will be “shut down for hours at a time,” Planning and Zoning Commissioner Dan Radman said Tuesday at the group’s meeting. “You’re going to be staging, bringing steel in, and cement trucks and everything else,” Radman said at the meeting, held in the Sturgess Room of the New Canaan Nature Center’s Visitors Center.

News

Building Permits Sought for Forest Street Residential-and-Retail Complex

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The owners of 21 Forest St. have put in for building permits that will see a widely anticipated mixed residential-and-retail complex come to a commercial block long known as a restaurant hub. Plans call for a three-story structure on what are really three separate lots that total about .72 acres, according to the building permit application made April 16 by Forest Street Properties LLC and plans on file at Planning & Zoning. (See the slideshow at the end of this article for a full look at artistic rendering and plans.)

The complex would include two commercial spaces—at 3,700- and 1,057-square feet, with the larger one on the north side (toward Locust)—as well as seven residential units (five on the second floor and then two larger ones on the third floor), a pocket park and 48-space parking lot. The residential units’ courtyard would include skylights to the commercial plaza below, a stone fireplace and stone-and-wood deck.