NEWTOWN -- A Danbury investor's plans to bring a 1946 warehouse back to life as a retail center on a busy stretch of Church Hill Road that's anchored by the Blue Colony Diner got approval from Newtown planners anxious to see something done with the blighted 7-acre site.
"I think it's great that this building is finally being renovated and this space will look so much nicer," said Barbara Manville, a member of the town's Planning and Zoning Commission during a public hearing last month.
Investor Anthony Rizzo Jr. agreed.
"The overall complex, when it is all said and done, will certainly give a lot more curb appeal than what's been there for the last 15 or 20 years," said Rizzo, president of Danbury-based Rizzo Companies. "We put our heart and soul into our buildings. When it's done, I believe everybody in Newtown will be thrilled with what they see there."
Rizzo is referring to a boarded-up 30,000-square foot warehouse deep on a 5-acre property next to the Housatonic Railroad bridge over Church Hill Road, where five storefronts are planned.
"When we had the opportunity to purchase the building and looked at what it was, many people would assume that you just take the building the way it is throw a coat of paint on it and save yourself a lot of expenses and run through the process of using it as a warehouse," Rizzo said during the October public hearing. "But to us the building has a lot more charm than that."
It's too soon to say what the retail center will look like because Rizzo is yet sign tenants, Rizzo's land use attorney told Newtown planners.
"The most important part of this (process) is being able to rent it out to users and to tell users how long it will take before they can move in," attorney Peter Olson said during the public hearing. "We want to be able to get those tenants in. We have a couple of commitments but the first question everybody asks is, 'How long is it going to take you to get all this work done?'"
Rizzo, the contractor for Danbury's west side high school and the contractor who's converting office space at Danbury's Summit into apartments, said during the October public hearing that he would come back to the town for permission to build a 7,000-square-foot retail building in front of the warehouse once renovations of the old warehouse are complete.
Rizzo received permission in March to rezone the vacant lot in front of the warehouse to allow for a retail building.
The first step is to convert the site from its blighted condition.
"If any of you remember the building, the kids had a field day with it," Rizzo said. "Windows smashed, etcetera. We cleared it out and put cameras and some lights on it."
Passersby can expect to see site work begin as soon as next week.
"The existing industrial building ... is in a condition that would be expected for an 80-plus-year-old building," the attorney Olson said. "Plans (are) to do a complete renovation of the building -- interior and exterior -- bringing it up to modern expectations and modern aesthetics, and giving it a refreshed view from Church Hill Road."
The blighted property is familiar to patrons of Reverie Brewery, which uses the same driveway and is located behind the warehouse.
"We are looking to make it more retail as opposed to warehousing," Rizzo told Newtown planners. "We have a couple of letters of intent now from people -- they don't want us to use their names -- but one of them is a gym and the other is a wholesale warehouse for storage purposes."