the former shopping center and industrial site on South 12th Street<\/a> is still up in the air. At its meeting Tuesday, the Allentown Planning Commission agreed to a year delay for the developer, Woodmont Properties, to submit final and recorded plans. This is the second one-year extension; the original deadline was Dec. 13, 2024.<\/p>\nThe current plan has a 133,050-square-foot warehouse building along with 3,600-square-feet of office space in a 45-foot-high building on the parcel at 1901 S. 12th St.<\/p>\n
James Preston, an attorney representing Woodmont, said the developer had been devoting most of its attention to a warehouse project on Emaus Avenue, but will be allocating more time to this one.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not that we haven\u2019t done anything,\u201d Preston said, noting the developer has been working with Norfolk Southern on issues with the adjacent railroad tracks. \u201cWe\u2019ve spent a significant amount of time doing so. We\u2019ve had asbestos abatement and we\u2019re currently working with PPL to look at possible data center use.\u201d<\/p>\n
Preston said demolition should begin in January or February.<\/p>\n
Commission Chair Christian Brown asked city Director of Planning and Zoning Jennifer Gomez if the city has guidelines for data centers.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is something that we need to look into,\u201d Gomez said. \u201cWe had considered it as part of the Zone Allentown initiative but we\u2019re too far along to start adding in any kind of big uses that we need to think through. It\u2019s on our radar for something for us to come back to.\u201d<\/p>\n
The 8.49-acre property was purchased by Woodmont for $5.275 million in March 2024. The mall closed in March 2023.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What\u2019s next for the site of the former Merchants Square Mall in South Allentown? How about a data…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":57218,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[119,153,155,154,60,433,182,139,28,432],"class_list":{"0":"post-57217","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-bethlehem","8":"tag-allentown","9":"tag-bethlehem","10":"tag-bethlehem-headlines","11":"tag-bethlehem-news","12":"tag-business","13":"tag-lehigh-county","14":"tag-local-news","15":"tag-news","16":"tag-pennsylvania","17":"tag-top-stories-tmc"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57217","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=57217"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57217\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/57218"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}