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Work continues at Park Place
Office building plan changed as eateries progress
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
 Click here to enlarge this photo Staff photo by REID SILVERMAN
Jimmy Thompson of Great Mills Trading Post directs the removal of dirt Monday as crews grade the land to build the roads and water and sewer lines at the Park Place project in California.
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Excavation and grading is proceeding to convert an old farm field into a restaurant/business office complex at the intersection of Shady Mile Drive and Route 235 in California.
On Thursday, the St. Mary's board of appeals voted 5-0 to allow a change from four five-story buildings to one three-story building. The footprint of the single building is larger, but overall the buildout is less than originally approved by the planning commission in 2007.
Three of the five restaurants to front along Route 235 have been negotiated, said project manager John Parlett, a Charlotte Hall developer. At the northwest corner will be a Buffalo Wild Wings, south of that an Olive Garden and south of that a Red Robin. The other two restaurants haven't been nailed down yet. At the corner of Shady Mile and Three Notch Road will be a bank.
The brick house at the corner, built in 1948, will be torn down. Someone wanted to physically move the house, but it could only go down Shady Mile Drive, because of overhead wires on Route 235. This person needed to buy a lot to put the house on, but couldn't afford one, Parlett said.
There is no specific date to tear the house down, but "it's in the near term," Parlett said. People who have inquired were allowed to remove doors and windows from the old house.
The overall project, called Park Place, also has approval for a 100-room hotel and another personal service building. Parlett is not pursuing any residential use right now, which was approved to the rear of the 30-acre site. The rear of the property is zoned residential neighborhood conservation area; the front is zoned for residential mixed use.
Fast-food restaurants and retail use are not allowed on the land.
"A lot of things have happened in the last two years in this economy," Parlett said, that have caused the project to scale back. The overall reduction is more than 52,000 square feet.
"When we got the planning commission approval, no one knew what the economy was going to be like," he said.
The reason for the change in the office buildings from four, five-story buildings to a single three-story building was because that is what a government contractor has requested, Parlett said.
"They want to be on three floors, they need 90,000 square feet," he said.
Access to Park Place will be a right-in, right-out off Route 235 and an entrance onto Shady Mile Drive. There are no roads across from Woodlawn Drive serving the Town Creek neighborhood, or Baringer Drive, serving North Town Creek.
There is no need for a visitor to Park Place to go farther down Shady Mile Drive. There will be sidewalks along Shady Mile Drive and cuts into the 6-foot berms along the road to allow pedestrians access into the center.
"We think we've developed a good plan. We've tried to be pedestrian-friendly as we can," Parlett said.
Park Place will also be responsible for rebuilding the outfall of a nearby pond on Shady Mile Drive, and replacing the drainage pipe under the road, as required by county agencies, "for something we didn't create," Parlett said. The land around the pond there was put up for auction recently, but the owning bank rejected the bids.
Before September 1981, Shady Mile Drive was called Patuxent Beach Boulevard, which was the road that led to the Gov. Thomas Johnson Memorial Bridge after it opened in December 1977.
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