With Washington Avenue, it's generally been good stuff over the last few years. Remember earlier this week, we told you the newest burst of good news, plans for a new restaurant at 20th & Washington. At the ZBA this week, the corridor potentially took another step forward when the project at 2401 Washington Avenue got approval. Remember, we gave you the details on this project earlier this year. A refresher, a mixed-use building designed by Harman Deutsch will replace a vacant lot- the building will include 113 apartments, 57 parking spots, and retail.
Obviously, this would be a big deal, representing the biggest change to date for this part of Washington Avenue. Of course, we said the same thing about 1601 Washington Ave., a project that got approved a couple years back but got overturned on appeal. One can only hope that the same fate doesn't befall the newly approved 2401 project. We'll hope and pray in the meantime.
Speaking of hoping and praying, it seems our prayers have gone unanswered regarding 2300 Washington Ave. and the storage facility planned for that address. We last updated this story in September, when we told you that the developers were going to build a 60'-tall building on this site and that it would be a by-right build. But since then, nothing's happened on the site. So we were hoping that a developer threw so much money at the storage facility people that they decided to sell off the property. But when we passed by the other day we saw a sign on the fence that we'd not seen before.
There's an elevation drawing of the storage facility on the sign, with an expected completion date of next spring. So it seems this thing is gonna happen after all. On the plus side, since plans for this project came down the pike, an overlay has come along that eliminates by-right industrial uses on Washington Avenue. This would have been really useful a year or two ago, doncha think? For all the future homeowners on Alter Street, it might have meant a mixed-use building in their front yard, not a big cube full of stuff. Bummer.