The planned Southbank site, above, with the North Shrewsbury Ice Boat & Yacht Club visible at center. Below, a rendering of the planned condos. (Photo by John T. Ward; rendering by Rotwein+Blake. Click to enlarge.)
By JOHN T. WARD
After two false starts this century, construction has begun on 10 luxury townhouses overlooking the Navesink River from a bluff in downtown Red Bank.
Developer Steve Denholtz at the site Tuesday. (Photo by John T. Ward. Click to enlarge.)
Dubbed Southbank, the project is going up on a vacant lot between West Front Street and Union Street, alongside Boat Club Court.
Borough-based Denholtz Properties obtained zoning board approval for the project in April, 2019. Its plan calls for five one-story condos topped by five two-story units, with 26 parking spots for tenants underneath the structure and eight more exposed.
At a groundbreaking ceremony Tuesday morning, Mayor Pasquale Menna called the half-acre bluff, which overlooks the North Shrewsbury Ice Boat & Yacht Club and the Monmouth Boat Club, a “challenging site,” one that for the past 30 or so years has been “a dirty, ramshackle parking lot.”
“The view is great. The property’s not that beautiful,” he said.
As previously reported by redbankgreen, separate development plans for the property won borough approval in 2004 and 2015, but neither came to fruition. (Menna mistakenly referred to the first as a “24-story tower;” a 24-unit, six-story building was approved.)
When completed, Menna said, Southbank will be “a premier address” in Red Bank.
“At the end of the day, we need housing. We need economic development,” Menna said. “Development is not a bad word. Development is a good word. It will put a lot of people in this site, living here, and others who visit them, who will go out to our restaurants, who will spend money.”
Company CEO Steve Denholtz told redbankgreen he expects to complete the project in about a year. Contracts on two units have been signed, he said.
The firm is also building an office-residential-commercial project called the Rail alongside the Red Bank train station, around its own headquarters on Chestnut Street. That 57-unit project is now scheduled for completion in early 2022.
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