David Minno is the architect at work on controversial garage project.
By: Jennifer Potash
Being selected as the architect to design the downtown Princeton Borough Spring Street redevelopment project one of the most controversial projects since Palmer Square in the 1930s might have seemed a bit like walking on hot coals to some professionals.
But David Minno, senior partner of Minno & Wasko, a Lambertville-based architectural and planning firm that designed a bulk of the project, kept cool by following a fairly simple axiom: present several alternatives and listen to the many opinions voiced by the public and the Borough Council. Mr. Minno and fellow architect Gary Wasko founded their firm in 1995, and prior to that he ran the Princeton office of a Philadelphia architectural firm.
"From very early on, it was really instilled in the whole team this was a public-private partnership and a very unique opportunity to respond to several different interest groups’ goals and objectives," said Mr. Minno, who has also designed downtown redevelopment projects in Cranford, Westfield and Red Bank. He is also working on two other projects in the downtown including the conversion of an office building on Nassau Street into a mixed-use building. "It wasn’t our design team coming up with a singular idea. We were to almost be … a mirror for the various groups to get their ideas on paper."
The Princeton Borough project involves a 500-car garage fronted by a five-story building with a restaurant, small ground-level retail area, and apartments on the other floors. The Spring Street lot will be converted into a landscaped paved stone plaza. A second five-story building containing a food market, apartments and a small plaza will go on the Tulane Street lot. There are plans for a small parking lot adjacent to the Tulane Street lot bordered by Nassau Street and Witherspoon Street businesses.
The combined 77 apartments include 12 affordable and moderate-income units, whose prices will be determined according to the Council on Affordable Housing standards.
The borough is paying $13.1 million for its share of the project which officials expect to be completed by December.
Work is under way to ready the site for construction but the project still faces a legal challenge from a group of residents and merchants. Concerned Citizens for Princeton, a grass-roots, nonprofit organization, sued and lost at the trial court to halt the project and is now appealing the lower court’s ruling.
The garage development’s genesis came in 1999, when Mayor Marvin Reed called for more downtown parking to meet the needs of growing institutions such as the Princeton Public Library and local merchants. A parking study in 2000 found the core central business district in the borough was at near 100-percent occupancy during peak hours, and between 60 and 70 percent occupancy for the rest of the day.
The Princeton Borough Council and Princeton Future, the nonprofit citizen’s group that promotes a holistic vision for downtown planning, held numerous meetings and hired consultants, architects and planners to devise a concept vision for the two lots. The borough put out a request for proposals to seek a developer for the project.
At the time, the concept plan called for a split garage on the two sites, Spring Street and Tulane Street, retail space and a much smaller residential component. But each developer deemed the two-garage plan unfeasible.
The borough selected Nassau HKT Associates LLC, which works with Mr. Minno’s firm; HNTB, a planning and design firm; and the Troast Construction Group.
Mr. Minno faced the challenge of designing a building for one of the most talked about spaces in the downtown.
The Nassau HKT proposal, with the two five-story, mixed-use buildings, drew protests from a significant portion of the community. A common objection was that the project would urbanize a suburban locale.
The schedule of public meetings quickly doubled, with the architects and planners holding design sessions in which residents brainstormed ideas and the architects sketched the suggestions on large pads of paper.
The borough, the developer and Princeton Future formed a working group of architects and planners to refine the plans. The group helped Mr. Minno and his team refocus the design so the new plaza not the buildings became the heart of the project.
"I think Bob Geddes (architect and co-chairman of Princeton Future) best put it that (the development) was a room that was being created and this was one of its walls in the room," Mr. Minno said. "But it wasn’t to dominate the entire scene."
So an early plan of the Spring Street building, with a façade resembling townhouses and no retail space, was scrapped in favor of a more inviting approach with a ground floor restaurant. Also, following complaints from some residents that the building was too massive and imposing, the Spring Street corner was rounded off, the tops floors stepped back, and a lighter color brick was chosen for the fifth floor of the building to blend in with the sky.
The design, while unique to Princeton’s downtown architecture, fits in with state and national urban-planning trends of blending retail and residential in a single site, Mr. Minno said.
"Princeton is a destination shopping place, but one of the things that really helps an older downtown is to have residents living there support retail," Mr. Minno said. "By putting people on the street during off hours the downtown continues to be secure because people are continually moving around as pedestrians."
With the Spring Street mixed-use building design concluded, Mr. Minno and his team are refining the design of the larger commercial and apartment building on the Tulane Street lot. A food market and live-work units, or apartments with a small business on the first floor and residential quarters upstairs, is slated for the ground floor of the Tulane Street building.
The live-work units solved both a housing need for the downtown and a marketing problem for the project, Mr. Minno said.
With the garage across the street and the rest of Spring Street mostly retail, a ground-level apartment with bedroom windows facing the street may not be attractive to potential tenants or fit into the streetscape, he said.
"It’s a good transition to the residential building to have the live-work combination," he said.

