Association’s future home has local businesses concerned about
parking
Gilroy – Officials with the Gilroy Garlic Festival Association have provided the first glimpse of the nonprofit group’s future home, a three-story building lauded as a cornerstone of downtown renewal. But local business owners continue to worry about the project’s effect on parking, a dwindling commodity during a year of major construction.
An artist’s rendering shown to planning commissioners last week depicts a modern style building, one with apartment balconies overlooking Lewis and Monterey streets. The building has a stucco and terra cotta exterior and large glass windows that will allow downtown shoppers to peer into the festival association offices.
“Accessibility will be improved in terms of holding meetings and being more openly visible to the community,” said Micki Pirozzoli, 2006 festival president. “It will be a great addition to the downtown and a cornerstone for the Garlic Festival and the city.”
The 12,000-square-foot building slated for construction at 7600 Monterey St. will include street-level space for two retailers, as well as two stories of apartments between 650 and 1,400 square feet. The apartments will range in price from the “$300,000s to $400,000s,” according to Jeff Martin, a GFA representative and developer who is managing the project.
GFA officials say the building will tie the downtown area together by filling in an “urban disconnect” created by a parking lot, and by serving as the gateway to one of the most anticipated projects in the city’s history – a 201-unit housing complex slated for the site of the old cannery. The project, put forth by nonprofit South County Housing, lies one block east on Lewis Street. It has been dubbed the northern linchpin of the area’s renaissance. Once complete, the South County project will include 40,000 square feet of space for coffee shops, book stores, and other retail uses, as well as apartments, live-work lofts, and townhouses.
“We hired the same architect specifically because they were doing the Cannery project, and the hope was that this project would link Monterey Street to the Cannery District,” Martin said, referring to Berger Detmer Ennis, an architectural firm in San Francisco. “The city really felt strongly that linking the areas is really important – it will bring all those residents and workers downtown.”
The GFA project was made possible by a land deal with city leaders, who agreed to sell the public lot at Lewis and Monterey streets to the Garlic Festival in exchange for the parking lot behind the group’s current home two blocks south. Officials have touted the deal as one that will add 30 parking spaces to the area, all of them off Eigleberry Street. But downtown business owners have decried the loss of the Lewis Street parking lot, which they financed through a tax on their businesses. The new Garlic Festival building will include 27 underground spaces, nearly all of them reserved for the two dozen apartments above.
Planning commissioners learned last week that Tanglewood Construction, the festival’s investment partner on the project, also plans to move its offices and 14 employees to the site on a temporary basis.
But not everyone is happy with the association’s plans.
“If we allow all these offices to come in, then they come in with more cars,” said Steve Ashford, owner of a downtown antique store. “I’ve yet to see anyone trying to accommodate (downtown) business people.”
Area businesses, employees and shoppers will likely have to use of the Lewis Street parking lot until August, when the GFA expects to begin construction. The Garlic Festival hopes to move into its new home by 2007.
The GFA project is one piece of major development under way in downtown Gilroy. In March, when PG&E workers finish laying gas lines along Monterey Street, the city will begin an overhaul of the road and sidewalks between Sixth and Fourth streets.
Meanwhile, a three-story building with apartments and commercial space is nearly complete across the street from the future GFA site, and on the west side of Monterey Street a new real estate office is under construction.
“It is a tough time right now, but to me, we have to go through some growing pains,” Mayor Al Pinheiro said of the construction and parking crunch. “That corner will be another icon for our downtown when it’s done. It will finish up that whole area.”
