By Lea Kahn, Staff Writer
The would-be developer of an assisted living facility on the site of the historic William Gulick House, on the corner of Route 206 and Province Line Road, has promised to submit revised plans for the project.
But those plans — which were to have been submitted shortly, according to Steven Rother, the applicant’s attorney — have not yet been filed with the Lawrence Township Community Development Department.
Mr. Rother wrote in an e-mail in August that “we plan on filing an amended application shortly,” in response to an inquiry from The Ledger on the status of the application.
The saga of the development of an assisted living facility on the 6.4-acre property at 3641 Lawrenceville Road has been going on since 1997. Several use variance applications have been submitted in the intervening years.
Developer 3641 Lawrenceville Road LLC, in conjunction with health-care provider Care One, filed a use variance application for the property in 2005 — the latest in a series of attempts to build an assisted living facility on the site.
A use variance is needed because assisted living facilities are not allowed in the Environmental Protection-1 zone. The EP-1 zone allows single-family detached houses, farms, and public parks and recreation.
The latest application — which Mr. Rother said would be amended — calls for a 150-bed facility on the property. The plan calls for demolishing the three-story white farmhouse and replacing it with a 92,085-square-foot assisted living facility. The building would consist of two wings — one for assisted living and another for skilled nursing care.
The Zoning Board of Adjustment, which handles use variance applications, held a public hearing on the application in October 2006. The hearing lasted about 15 minutes because the architectural drawings for the building presented at the meeting did not reflect what was actually proposed.
At the time, zoning board members pointed out that the plans showed three double-occupancy rooms that were really single-occupancy rooms. Guest rooms were shown on the second and third floors, but they were supposed to be located only on the second floor, according to the applicant.
The applicant agreed at that meeting to submit an accurate set of drawings in time for the board’s December 2006 meeting — but nothing has been submitted. There have not been any public hearings on the application in two years.
The current application is the third one filed by the applicant, who has been seeking to build an assisted living facility on the William Gulick House property for more than 10 years.
The zoning board rejected a use variance application in 1997, prompting the developer to file a lawsuit that was ultimately denied by the U.S. District Court. The zoning board approved a revised plan in 1999, but that project did not go forward.
The William Gulick House, which has been boarded up for several years, sits in front of the Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. campus on the southwest corner of Route 206 and Province Line Road. It was built in the 1850s by wealthy farmer William Gulick for his growing family.
The three-story house — built in the Italianate style and later remodeled in the Colonial Revival style — is included on the township’s list of historic properties, but it is not included on the State Register of Historic Places or the National Register of Historic Places. Inclusion on the township, list or the state or national registers does not prevent an owner from tearing down a building.
However, the William Gulick House was placed on Preservation New Jersey’s list of the 10 most endangered historic sites for 2007. The list is compiled annually by Preservation New Jersey, which is a private membership-supported historic preservation organization that seeks to rise public awareness of historic sites, according to its Web site, www.preservationnj.org.
And in 2005, the National Trust for Historic Preservation highlighted the house on its on-line magazine’s Web site, www.nationaltrust.org/magazine.

