According to the Intelligencer-Journal, former Lancaster City mayor and current candidate Charlie Smithgall criticized Randy Patterson and the Gray administration for failure to include the Brunswick Hotel in redevelopment plans for Lancaster Square East.
“Smithgall cited a recent newspaper article in which the Bulova building and Lancaster Square were named as possible revitalization zones.
With Lancaster Square behind him Thursday evening, Smithgall said the Brunswick Hotel also should be included.
‘Let’s fix this block right,’ he said, noting that the Bulova building and the hotel are connected.
They were built together as a failed urban renewal effort, he said. They should be revitalized together, even if that means leveling them and starting over, he said.
‘To do it right, you have to do the block as a project,’ Smithgall maintained.”
Lancaster Square East includes the Bulova Building that has long been vacant, the Brunswick Hotel and the Brunswick Annex. Along with the parking garage at Duke and Chestnut, they are part of a land condominium which prevents alterations of the building footprints.
There is no adequate market for the Brunswick now that the City built, owns and leases the competing Marriott Hotel. Yet the high cost of maintaining a structure as large as the competing Marriott continues. It is an impossible situation to correct without massive subsidies from ownership.
Even more inexplicable and little known, the Bulova building was long allowed to manufacture munitions at the risk of blowing up half of downtown Lancaster!
Let’s raze the block, other than the parking garage , and start over again with a needed upscale condominium residential development. Let’s get it right this time.
After two full terms in office, it is long overdue for City Planner Patterson and Mayor Rick Gray to stop focusing solely on the Bulova building and address Lancaster Square East as a single project. Nothing less will serve the interest of downtown revitalization.
