City officials see their 1.85-square-mile
town at the core of a region generally encompassing the Coatesville Area
School District, where municipalities have an estimated 7,000 new homes on
the drawing board.
"We're the next big center" of development west of Philadelphia, City
Manager Paul G. Janssen Jr. said during a recent walking tour of the
downtown.
But, can the city deliver?
Just watch, Janssen and others say.
After five years of talk, city officials announced on Friday that they
had lined up two major developers to lead a whopping $300 million chunk of
the project.
Tonight, Janssen will seek approval from the City Council and
redevelopment authority to name Tower Investments Inc., of Philadelphia, and
Oliver Tyrone Pulver Corp., of West Conshohocken, as the preferred
developers of a residential, retail, office and entertainment complex - much
of it to stand on the grounds of the old Lukens Steel Co.
And later this week, the University of Miami will conduct an intensive,
$200,000 community-design study to come up with additional revitalization
ideas.
"For Coatesville, the timing is opportune," said Charles Bohl, director
of the university program that will bring a 30-member study group of
graduate fellows, architects and faculty to town Wednesday.
"You're seeing a tremendous amount of growth in Chester County," he said.
"It's suburban; some would call it sprawl."
Coatesville, meanwhile, is one of few "old, urban places" in the region
that "hold a great potential for people who want an alternative to the
suburban lifestyle," Bohl said.
Highlights of the plan that goes before city officials tonight include up
to 750 residential units, 1.5 million square feet of premium office space,
550,000 square feet of retail and other commercial space, 40,000 square feet
of entertainment space, and the river walk.
"It's going to be huge," City Councilman David DeSimone said. "These two
developers, what they will bring to Coatesville in the future will help
shape Coatesville in ways that will benefit generations to come."
Bohl's imminent study, the third of its kind conducted by the
University of Miami's Knight Program in Community Building (the
others were in Macon, Ga., and San Jose, Calif.), is being funded by the
John S. & James L. Knight Foundation, which is associated with Knight Ridder
Inc., corporate parent of The Inquirer.
Plans to revitalize Coatesville's central business district are separate
from those for an expansive and controversial recreation complex that city
officials want to build on land that is mostly outside city limits.
That proposal for a golf course, hotel and other amenities on a 290-acre
tract north of downtown is the subject of a contentious legal battle over
the city's intention to take farmland owned by Dick Saha in neighboring
Valley Township. Saha has vigorously fought the move.
It is also the target of three referenda that opponents of the
golf-course plan have placed on ballots for the Nov. 4 election in hopes of
blocking the project altogether.
The golf-course opponents say the city has overreached its authority in
the Saha case and should be reined back inside its own border. Janssen and
other city officials say wording of the ballot measures would so severely
limit municipal powers that, if approved, they would threaten Coatesville's
ability to put firefighters, police and trash collectors on the streets.
Longtime business owners who have remained in the city are desperate for
a renaissance.
"I think I'm the only one here trying to stay alive," said Nick
Anagnostopoulos, owner for the last 23 years of Zorba's, a restaurant in the
700 block of East Lincoln Highway.
Anagnostopoulos credits Janssen for significant improvements in the last
few years, such as demolishing several blighted properties near his
restaurant, removing abandoned cars, and closing a seedy bar.
But he worries that the time he can continue to wait for significant
change is running out.
"I was thinking to move out - to move out of the town," he said. "I feel
bad because I put all my years here, but in the end, if it continues to be
the same situation, I'm feeling like I'm nowhere."
On the walking tour, Janssen pointed proudly to the new facades of six
renovated downtown storefronts topped with several dozen apartments, a
restaurant that now has unprecedented Friday evening hours, and grassy lots
that were, until recently, occupied by blighted structures.
Once-vacant or under-used school buildings have been reoccupied by the
Coatesville Area School District, which is hungry for space to educate the
district's exploding enrollment.
At Route 82 and East Lincoln Highway, the city's major crossroads,
Janssen looked west across a dusty two-lane bridge - the only link between
the city's two halves - and described plans for two additional spans across
the Brandywine Creek that bisects Coatesville.
Janssen also described plans for razing additional portions of several
weathered blocks to make way for mid-rise apartment buildings, shops and
offices.
But he acknowledged, too, the many remaining empty storefronts, and a
block that he called "the very definition of blight" - the site of a
long-boarded grocery store surrounded by vacant lots.
"This block is a killer . . . completely dysfunctional," Janssen said.
Bohl's group will attempt to find new uses for such sites. His studies,
called "charettes," devote a week of public meetings, with input from
community members, to the production of specific, block-by-block
recommendations.
Bohl said the Knight program targets needy municipalities within the
circulation areas of Knight Ridder publications, and Coatesville was
selected in a competitive process.
"Looking at this old, urban place in the middle of a wealthy, suburban
area, it's interesting to see how it evolves," Bohl said. "It is such a real
place. It does have a lot of character and potential. I really hope we can
help them identify what their assets are, what their strengths are."
Contact staff writer Reid Kanaley at 610-701-7637 or rkanaley@phillynews.com.
