By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
A power outage Thursday night interrupted a Princeton Planning Board hearing on a proposal to turn the old Palmer Square Post Office into a brewpub, with the case carried to next month.
The lights inside the main meeting room of Witherspoon Hall stayed on, but the audio system and the air conditioning went out sometime around 9:50 p.m. The disruption led board members to try and pick a new date for the hearing to continue, finally settling on Aug. 3 at 7:30 p.m.
Only one expert witness was able to testify on behalf of a project by real estate businessman David Eichler, who won the bid for the Post Office building.
He has proposed renovating the building, built in 1932, making improvements including replacing the loading docks in the back with a glass box entrance and bringing Triumph Brewing Co., now on Nassau Street, to the location. Triumph will be open seven days a week, and have 297 seats, municipal planning director Lee O. Solow told the board in his remarks.
The old lobby will be turned into a dining room, and the historic mural, “Columbia under the Palm,” seen as controversial by some for its depiction of Indians, would be preserved.
“I think the board understands that this is a fully conforming, beautiful adaptive reuse of a very, very important building,” said Eichler’s lawyer, Richard Goldman, after the abbreviated hearing. “What I was excited about, it’s going to be used by a really well-known, long-standing local business.”
The project is a variance-free application, but a resident of Palmer Square and former candidate for Congress, Scott Sipprelle, is challenging it.
Sipprelle, who was at Thursday’s hearing, hired a lawyer to cross-examine the developer’s experts.
In a statement Friday, Sipprelle said: "No one is a bigger booster of Princeton or proponent of investing in our town. But the mega-bar proposed for the historic Post Office is massively oversized and will wreak havoc on the current parking shortage while endangering the public safety in our town square.
“The development is attempting to exploit a perceived loophole in our parking codes to argue that a new 300 seat brewpub will create less parking demand than a small Post Office that closed its doors before dinner hours,” he said. “That claim is obviously absurd and the Planning Board must recognize that."
