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Financial concerns led officials of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the United States to decide to sell the Ukrainian Cultural Center to a developer, the township’s Historic Preservation Advisory Commission was told on May 6.
The developer, Creation Equity of Phoenix, Az., has submitted plans to the Township to raze the Cultural Center and build in its place a 458,000-square-foot logistics center warehouse.
The plans come under the Commission’s purview because the Cultural Center is located within 1,000 feet of the Delaware & Raritan Canal.
The Commission at its April meeting awarded part of the project – widening the church’s driveway fronting Easton Avenue and adding more parking spaces – a certificate of appropriateness.
The project must get two more certificates; one for the demolition of the Center, and one for the construction of the warehouse.
The Center, dedicated in 1987, is showing its age, the church’s Archbishop Antony told the Commissioners at the May meeting.
The Center “really has the original air conditioning,” the Archbishop said. “And the boilers will be replaced, a couple of boilers, but the whole system has to be replaced now. And the roof needs to be replaced. And we simply do not have the finances to do that.”
“There aren’t too many places around that like to make loans to churches for that kind of construction,” he said. “So we came to the point where we thought it would probably be in our best interest to sell some property.”
But potential suitors wanted all of the church’s property, all the way to Easton Avenue, the Archbishop said. That was not acceptable, he said.
That would include the Church’s seminary building, the administrative building and the museum, he said.
Then along came Creation Equity.
“The thing that was most impressive to me about Creation was that they came back and with the realization of how much the seminary building meant to us and how much it meant historically, they did not want to take any steps towards demolishing that,” he said. “And also the administrative center, this is our national headquarters for the entire nation, and actually for all of Ukraine, Europe, that’s directly on the borders of Ukraine.”
“That administrative center and that museum has an incredible meaning to people really all over the world,” he said. “And so they came back with the proposal just to purchase the area on which the cultural center is located.”
“I have never, in any kind of a business deal, I’ve never had a more incredible group of people to work with who have done everything they can to accommodate our needs and accommodate the needs of our people,” he said.
Archbishop Antony said that before Creation made its offer, the prospect of selling all of the property “became a nightmare for us.”
“Because we would have had to find a new place for a seminary, a new place for a library and administrative offices, a new place for a museum,” he said. “It was just absolutely not feasible. You could never find anything that is in one place where we could fit all those facilities.”
The Archbishop said selling the property will allow the church to make needed repairs to its historic building, and also build a new cultural center, although it will be about one-third the size of the current one, “but sufficient for our needs for meetings that we have during the year.”
Antony said the sale will also allow the church to make needed renovations to its seminary, which was built in 1840.
“It is in need of significant engineering study and rebuilding,” he said. “And we have to do some foundation work and do some new windows and a new roof and possibly some kind of redesign inside of it.”
Luke Georgiadis, a principal with Creation Equity, told the Commissioners that his company is buying the Cultural Center and 18 acres of land around it.
“We’re programming a 258,000-square-foot logistics facility,” he said. “As a company, and with every project we do, we really do try to place an emphasis on the appearance, how our buildings are delivered to the market, and how our neighbors will receive them.”
“We focus a lot on architecture and design, but also just site planning and programming and making sure we’re not leaving things out when we’re programming sites,” he said. “From an architectural perspective … we use as much glass as we can, especially on the fronts of the buildings.”
“We really try to dress up the fronts of our buildings with architectural canopies, with wood paneling and things like that,” he said. “As much landscaping as we can fit, and obviously an eco-friendly design. From a functional perspective, we’ve oriented our truck ports facing south, so they face toward I-287, away from Easton Avenue, and we’ve also shielded the truck port from Davidson Avenue as well.”
Commissioners were concerned about the property’s proposed lighting, and more specifically, two 30-foot tall lights that will be placed in the parking lot. Most of the lighting will be wall-mounted, the Commissioners were told.
There will also be about 100 trees planted along Davidson Avenue, the Commission was told.
Creation will have to return to the Commission next month to show Commissioners their revised lighting plan and more details about the Cultural Center before a certificate of appropriateness for the demolition can be approved.
The certificate is just one of a myriad of approvals the project must acquire before the application is heard by the Zoning Board of Adjustment.
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