The Riverhead Town Board is slated to hold a public hearing on the propose site plan for the new five-story hotel adjacent to the town’s Town Square project at a special meeting this Wednesday, June 10 at 6 p.m.
Pictured Above: A rendering of the “Peconic Hotel” presented to the Riverhead Town Board at its May 14 work session.
The five-story “Peconic Hotel,” slated to be a part of the Hilton Tapestry Collection is currently proposed as a five-story, 69,738-square-foot building containing a 94-room hotel, retail spaces, a restaurant, café and nine parking stalls on the lowest level, according to the public hearing notice.
The project is being proposed by J. Petrocelli Contracting, named last year the town’s Master Developer of the Town Square project.
The hotel will be on property transferred last year from the town to J. Petrocelli as part of the Town Square deal. It was initially slated to include 76 hotel rooms rooms, 12 penthouse condos on the fifth floor, three retail shops and a restaurant facing onto the Town Square, and parking spaces for the condos under the building.
The condos have now been replaced with 14 hotel suites.
The Town Board discussed the latest plan with Joseph Petrocelli, town planners and town environmental consultant Jeffrey Seeman at a May 14 work session.
Mr. Seeman said State Environmental Quality Review Act review of the project will be limited, using the rationale that the Town Square project is a flood mitigation project and therefore would not have a significant environmental impact.
At that work session, Mr. Petrocelli, who built the Long Island Aquarium and the Hyatt Place and Preston House hotels just to the east of the Town Square site said the town needs “to keep the momentum going” with the downtown revitalization.
He said when the aquarium was built, people would walk up the street to downtown Riverhead, see the vacant stores and go home.
In addition, he said, “attendance for the aquarium leveled out ten years ago and is now dropping. We need that spark.”
Board members seemed excited to hear about the project at the May 14 work session.
Councilman Ken Rothwell said the town needed to “address as soon as possible the vacant blighted building on west side of the Town Square, so it becomes an entire marketable space.”
The Town Board did just that on June 3 when it voted to begin condemnation proceedings against the Long Island Science Center, which owns the building, which had once been home to the Swezey’s department store.
“Downtown needs to be activated,” said Councilwoman Joann Waski, who said that from her office she can see families arrive in their cars to go to the aquarium and then get back into their cars and leave without visiting downtown.
“The flood mitigation is excellent. That’s so key to the small businesses surviving downtown,” said Town Supervisor Jerry Halpin.
“It’s building time,” said Councilman Bob Kern.
Here are the publicly available documents for this hearing.
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