READING, Pa. – One of downtown Reading’s most recognizable high-rise buildings may soon have a new chapter added to its history.<\/p>\n
The Reading Zoning Hearing Board on Wednesday voted to approve a special exception to allow a Delaware-based developer to create a mixed-use of residential and commercial uses in the Madison building.<\/p>\n
The Madison building, which is located at 400 Washington Street, was built in the late 1920s and was the original headquarters for the Metropolitan Edison Co.<\/p>\n
The building, which is located in the commercial-core zoning district, is currently mostly vacant.<\/p>\n
Developer David Hasenfeld, owner of Madison 2020 LLC, New Castle, Delaware, has an adaptive reuse plan to create 85 high-end apartment units with both one and two-bedroom floor plans.<\/p>\n
Hasenfeld has an agreement of sale to buy the building from Design Industry LLC, which was contingent on a positive outcome from zoning.<\/p>\n
Within the building’s glass ceiling atrium, Hasenfeld said he plans to create a caf\u00e9, as well as some undetermined commercial spaces on the first five floors.<\/p>\n
Lee C. Olsen from Olsen Design Group Architects is the project architect.<\/p>\n
In a hearing held via zoom in July, Olsen called the Madison a grand building with traces of art deco and said it was one of the first high-rises built in Reading in the post-Industrial era.<\/p>\n
Olsen said no major changes would take place to the exterior of the building.<\/p>\n
“This is a great opportunity to retain professionals downtown and bring back the glory that was there before,” Olsen told the board at the July hearing.<\/p>\n
Also included within the zoning relief is a waiver of parking requirements.<\/p>\n
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Matt Roth | 69 News<\/p>\n
The site itself has 49-off street parking requirements, but Hasenfeld testified last month that he has an agreement with the Reading Parking Authority to lease 79 spaces in the Chiarelli Plaza garage.<\/p>\n
The zoning ordinance requires 1.5 spaces per resident, for a total requirement of 128 spaces, but zoning also requires that off-street parking be located no more than 300-feet from the entrance to a building.<\/p>\n
The Chiarelli garage is about 425 feet away from the building.<\/p>\n
Hasenfeld asked for a modification to that requirement, saying without a parking waiver, he could not come up with enough off-street parking spaces.<\/p>\n
Hasenfeld said the project could attract professional employees from Albright College, Reading Area Community College and Alvernia University’s CollegeTowne project, located nearby.<\/p>\n
But Hasenfeld said the units will not be used for student housing.<\/p>\n
In another decision from the July hearings, the zoning board approved a special exception for a restaurant use at 1128 Pike Street, located in a high-density residential zoning district.<\/p>\n
Ryan McFadden, owner of Reading Storage, LLC, said he would like to lease the store-front building as a restaurant. The site also includes 32 storage units.<\/p>\n
McFadden said he previously received zoning relief to use the building as an office, but has been unsuccessful in finding a tenant.<\/p>\n
The building was used as a restaurant in 1997, but was most recently used to house a youth organization.<\/p>\n
In a new hearing, the board heard a request from Iglesia Pentecostal Movimiento de Fe Inc. to expand an existing house of worship at 1124 Schuylkill Avenue and eliminate the need for three additional off-street parking spaces. The church, which received its original relief in 2014, is located in the commercial-neighborhood zoning district.<\/p>\n
The owners of an adjacent laundromat complained about church members using their parking spaces.<\/p>\n
The board continued the matter until September to allow the church and the laundromat owners to come up with an amicable parking plan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"READING, Pa. – One of downtown Reading’s most recognizable high-rise buildings may soon have a new chapter added…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":206723,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[90863,90858,90860,90859,90857,5011,128,130,129,90862,90861,1087],"class_list":["post-206722","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-reading","tag-chiarelli-plaza-garage","tag-david-hasenfeld","tag-design-industry-llc","tag-lee-c-olsen","tag-madison-2020-llc","tag-madison-building","tag-reading-city","tag-reading-city-headlines","tag-reading-city-news","tag-reading-storage-llc","tag-ryan-mcfadden","tag-zoning"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206722","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=206722"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206722\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/206723"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=206722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=206722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=206722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}