Firm plans supermarket on site of old restaurant
BY JOYCE BLAY
Staff Writer
LAKEWOOD — A supermarket that burned down last summer may find new life and new business on the site of a longtime Lakewood restaurant that shuttered its doors years ago.
On May 2, the Zoning Board of Adjustment is scheduled to hear an application for a use variance requested by Zaev Rothschild and Mark Engel of Zebra Holding Company L.L.C., which owns NPGS supermarket. The partners seek to build a new home for the business in a 63,907-square-foot, two-floor facility on an 11-acre site that straddles a highway development (HD-6) zone and a residential (R-75) zone on Route 9 north, near the railroad tracks.
The site is currently occupied by Petersen’s, a restaurant that was renamed for the family that bought it decades ago, according to Sheldon Wolpin, chairman of the Lakewood Heritage Commission.
“George Petersen bought the restaurant, then called The Sunset, from William Lowa in the late 1930s or early 1940s,” said Wolpin. “It was a very busy place at the time since Lakehurst Naval Air Station, as it was called then, was also in the area and many World War II service personnel frequented its bar.”
Wolpin said the restaurant passed through a succession of owners before going out of business. The property was sold several years ago, he said.
Since then, Engel has made two previous applications to the zoning board for permission to build townhouse developments on the site, according to David Drukaroff, a clerk/typist in the township inspections department.
Drukaroff said the first application was made in September 2000 for a 22-house development. He said the zoning board denied the application by a vote of 6-1 on the grounds that it was not an appropriate place for a residential community.
The board denied a second application in 2003 by a vote of 4-3 on the same grounds, said Drukaroff.
Rothschild is hoping the third try will be the charm.
The new building would include 36,067 square feet of retail floor space, 2,960 square feet of office space and 24,880 square feet of storage space on the site.
The store has a recent history as notable as that of the restaurant it would replace.
Last summer, the building in which NPGS and a bodega shared space on Main Street (Route 88) was destroyed by a fire. The building’s destruction continued to make newspaper headlines after household products stocked by the store mixed with water runoff from firefighters battling the blaze. The runoff eventually flowed into Lake Shenandoah, killing thousands of fish there.
As resilient as the lake, which returned to normal a day later, the supermarket reopened for business out of a 16,000-square-foot tent on the Main Street site.
“There isn’t enough room at the present location, so we want to move our operations,” Rothschild said on April 22. “We hope to have fresh fish and a meat department, which we don’t have right now.”
Rothschild said architects Lawrence Schreiber and Ben Baekhertike have designed a two-floor building that would follow the slope of the land behind the restaurant, which currently sits on stilts where the back portion drops off from the frontage on Route 9.
“There’ll be a dance studio in the lower portion, as well as retail stores and storage space for the [supermarket],” Rothschild said.
He said if the zoning board approves his request for a use variance, construction is anticipated to be completed within nine months. Rothschild invited shoppers from Lakewood’s diverse communities and those surrounding the town to visit the store once it was open.
“We are a community-based business and we serve everyone in town,” he said.