By Sunayana Prabhu
RED BANK – A four-story, 45-unit apartment plan for 121 Monmouth St. won variance approvals from the borough’s zoning board members at the Nov. 3 meeting.
The project will replace an office building currently on the site and an adjoining gym that was once Big Man’s West, a bar owned by Bruce Springsteen’s legendary saxophonist Clarence Clemons.
“We’ll call it ‘The Sax’ after the late, great Clarence Clemons,” developer Michael Salerno told The Two River Times as his three-year quest to construct the project came to fruition after multiple revisions.
First heard by the zoning board Feb. 17, 2020, the original proposal for a five-story building with 59 units was scaled down to a four-story, mixed-use building with 46 units, meant for residential and retail space.
The only opposition came from Kevin Asadi, lawyer for Station Place apartments, located nearby. Asadi, present with his professional traffic engineer Lee Klein, objected to the approval citing insufficient parking.
Klein, testifying before the board, said he reviewed the preliminary and final major site plan and subdivision plan for 121 Monmouth St. and was concerned the project requires a total of 99 parking spaces and only 59 have been proposed. “That’s a deficiency of 40 parking spaces,” Klein noted.
Asadi added that the impact is “going to spread out throughout the neighborhood, forcing people that would normally have parked on the street for things like the Count Basie Theatre or events or restaurants in the area, to go further and further out or possibly not coming to downtown because parking is difficult, more difficult.”
“It’s ironic that they’ve got a building right down the street that has 10 times the number of variances that we’ve got,” the project’s attorney Ed McKenna said in his counter-argument, referring to Station Place’s 45-unit apartment building on the same block. Responding to parking concerns, McKenna said, “There are 270 spaces within a block of the Count Basie Theatre in the White Street municipal lot.”
Board member Sean Murphy said the project is “going to enhance connectivity from Monmouth Street to Broad on the West Side.”
Another member, Eileen Hogan, said she was concerned over density and setback of this project, “but the struggle is I really like the project, the building needs to be up there.”
Board member Vincent Light said he was, overall, in favor of the project that would include the house on Oakland in affordable housing. “I liked the fact that you’ve incorporated retail on the ground level,” he added.
With member Ray Mass in attendance over the phone, the project was unanimously approved with a 7-0 vote from board members Murphy, Hogan, Light, Kevin Kennedy, Anne Torres, Christine Irwin and Sharon Lee.
There is no timeline established for the project yet but the developer looks forward to collaborations with neighboring businesses like Count Basie and to elevate the West Side experience of Red Bank.
The article originally appeared in the November 17 – 23, 2022 print edition of The Two River Times.
