Infrastructure work for the first phase of the Highland Park project is nearly complete. LPCiminelli is leading a team consisting of Ciminelli Real Estate Corporation, Stieglitz Snyder Architecture, Wendel, and Boston-based planning firm Goody Clancy on the project that will see over six hundred rental units and a small amount of commercial space built on the 27-acre former Central Park Plaza site.

Highland Park is anticipated to have 663 residential units, with a mix of apartments, walk-up flats and townhouses. Eighty percent of the units will be market-rate and the balance will be income-restricted affordable. It will also introduce a wide range of housing choices, including lofts and senior housing, to the area. The actual number and mix of unit types will depend upon market conditions, but the site could contain up to a maximum of 800 new rental units.

The project will include a new network of public streets cutting through the existing superblock and creating block sizes more consistent with the surrounding neighborhood. Chalmers Avenue will be extended east through the site as a boulevard with a landscaped median. Additional east-west and north-south thoroughfares will be constructed through the site, connecting to existing streets.

Hill Street, which traditionally was not well-defined through the former plaza site, would be designed as a major axis of the street design, and there will be a traffic circle at the intersection of the Chalmers Avenue extension and Hill Street. Wade Avenue, which currently dead ends at Holden Street, will be extended eastward to provide a connection to Manhattan Avenue.

Build-out will occur in three phases starting with 229 units in the first phase centered along Chalmers Avenue (entry image and rendering above). That will be followed by 306 units in a second phase and 128 units in the final phase. A spokesperson for LPCiminelli was unable to provide a start date for the first residential units.

Site photos by Jonathan Jerome Hargrove‎

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