On Sept. 29 the Park Ridge Planning and Zoning Commission gave the thumbs down to a hotel proposal near the Uptown area.
The vote was five-to-two with Chairman James Hanlon abstaining.
“I’ve never abstained in my life,” he said. “Tonight, I abstain. I’m not a yes, I’m not a no.”
Even so, a no vote from the commission doesn’t prevent the matter from going before the city council and it also automatically allows the petitioner, Andrew Nast, to have a re-hearing. A no vote is a recommendation, not a prohibition. The project would require two votes, a rezoning vote and approval for the hotel itself.
Nast is the owner of Victory Grounds, a real estate development firm. Nast has argued there is no hotel in Park Ridge and a boutique hotel could bring in events like weddings and host visitors who seek an alternative to the nearby airport chains.
The ambitious project was presented to the board first over last winter, but was withdrawn facing board objections. Since then, the project has been re-imagined several times, though the size of the project has remained about one city block. The property sits along West Touhy, which is at present the location of nine cottages—some over 100 years old—and runs along Third and Garden streets.
In the end, the proposed 90-room boutique hotel with a commercial space plus residential properties was simply too dense and too close to houses. The project would reimagine an existing city block of century-plus homes and turn it into a five-story luxury hotel with a subterranean parking garage and while the proposed project was near the Uptown area, it wasn’t situated within Uptown itself.
During commission discussion, Hanlon said the plan did make sense in that regard. He said if the houses simply vanished overnight, the city would likely try to put a hotel in that space.
“How does uptown, how does this business core center, continue to creep a little bit,” he asked. “We don’t have any land to grow on.”
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But Commissioner E.J. Paprocki said the plan wasn’t exactly a smooth transition from residential to commercial.
“It’s not really a transition from low density to heavy use as it is just heavy use,” Paprocki said. Commissioner Clayton Hutchinson agreed, and said the commission generally prefers duplexes or something a little less dense, though he noted a parking garage in the area would be an amenity, as would the revenue the project brought the city. But then he noted the density.
“This isn’t much of that transition; it just kind of goes heavy use,” he said. “It’s not my favorite, our favorite, a duplex that transitions into different areas. It’s a close call for me.”
Hutchinson eventually voted for the project.
Nast did not return an e-mail for comment.
The project may go before the Park Ridge City Council as early as October.
Jesse Wright is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.