Lansdale considers removing sidewalk island in front of former art center

Could a partial solution to Lansdale’s long-running debate about downtown parking come soon?

Council is asking for feedback on whether a longtime fixture on Main Street could be removed.

“We talked about the potential removal of the island in front of 311 West Main Street,” said councilman BJ Breish.

“This island was designed for the former performing arts center, as an area for patrons to queue prior to performance events in the building,” he said.

311 West Main Street was the talk of the town for much of the 2010s, as the former Masonic Temple that was built in the 1910s was bought by the borough in 2004, operated as a performing arts center in 2009-10, and closed the latter year due to safety concerns. Over the next five years, council and residents debated what to do with the building, and in late 2014 council voted to sell it; after another year-and-a-half of public listings and negotiations, then in June 2016 council accepted a bid from a regional investor. Since then, the top floors of the building have been converted into apartments and the ground and basement floors into retail shops, currently the Game Junkie shop and Retroware arcade on the Main Street site and Well Crafted brewery on the Madison Street side.

At the same time, parking has resurfaced as a hot topic around town, with residents and employees calling in recent months for the town to find ways to add or encourage turnover in parking spaces downtown, while borough officials have pointed to the town’s SEPTA garage as a site containing several hundred spaces that go largely unused. Since a 2011 parking study looking at the entire town, Lansdale has implemented changes in parking prices to encourage turnover in the downtown area, the purchase of electronic kiosks to replace meters in three downtown lots, installation of wayfinding signs around town to point drivers toward lots, and the adoption of an app-based mobile payment system. The borough also began issuing parking permits in 2019 for residents to park on neighborhood streets near the SEPTA garage without being ticketed, and separate permits were issued by SEPTA in 2021 allowing drivers to park in the garage during snow emergencies, both ahead of a 2023 update to the initial parking study prompted further talks.

One possible solution was discussed by the town’s public works committee on April 2, Breish said: removing the plaza in front of the former arts center building.

“It currently no longer requires a large queueing area, and removal will allow for more efficient road maintenance, as well as provide two additional parking spaces in the downtown district,” Breish said.

“Now would be an opportunity to consider doing this project. It’s a project that could be conducted in-house, at relatively low cost, and it could be done prior to PennDOT coming through and paving the roadway,” he said.

Talks on doing so are likely to continue at the public works committee’s next meeting on May 7, and that group could vote ahead a recommendation that night for council action on May 21 before any PennDOT paving that could happen as soon as summer.

“No action is coming yet, but it would be something that if we wanted to get it done, now would be the time. I’d encourage the rest of council to get your thoughts and ideas and opinions about that, back to the department,” he said.

    

Council has also discussed in recent weeks whether to make upgrades a few steps away, to add signage and lights to the pedestrian crossing on Main at Susquehanna Avenue, and Breish said upgrades there would also need PennDOT approval and could be brought up with the state prior to their paving project.

“Go out, take a look at it, check it out. There’s been conversations about looking at that crosswalk at Susquehanna, and there might be implications there, if we do work on the roadway, so take a look at that,” Breish said.

Councilman Andrew Carroll asked if staff had discussed removing both the cutout at 311 and a similar one at Susquehanna, and Breish said council and staff are starting talk on just one, and he’s seen firsthand another problem at 311.

“I’ve been involved in the previous Main Street cleanups, and there’s definitely some maintenance issues there: the drainage gets clogged. It would help in several ways,” Breish said.

Carroll replied that the cutouts were also discussed during the public safety committee meeting that night, and said “there were some good points made in favor of (keeping) the one at Susquehanna, which I tend to agree with. The other one, I could be on board with” removing.

Resident Dominic Frascella then made the case for keeping the cutout, saying he’s seen people stand there after visiting the nearby businesses, and argued changes the feel of that side of Main Street.

“Part of the feel is the additional width that is allowed by those places to congregate, such as in front of 311,” he said.

“I constantly see people congregating, gathering, talking about what they just saw, or what they did, or planning their next place to meet. I think it would be a real shame if we lost that slight bit of additional friendliness for pedestrians,” he said.

Councilwoman Meg Currie Teoh said, during talks by the public safety committee that she chairs, the crosswalk upgrades at Susquehanna could be done “in the near future,” and borough staff have scheduled a meeting with SEPTA “in the coming weeks” to discuss parking in the garage. Breish said he hoped the ongoing talks about parking could reference the 2023 parking study update, and borough Manager John Ernst said parking passes purchased by the authority will be part of the talks between the borough, police, SEPTA and the town’s parking authority, and complaints from residents about the pedestrian bridge between the garage and downtown.

“We’re going to be talking about some of the concerns that we’re seeing on Facebook about the bridge, and the unkempt nature of — and activity in — the bridge. And we’re going to be talking about some of the concerns about the parking kiosks” in the lot below the garage and bridge, Ernst said.

“It may not be just one meeting, but we want to start the conversation about some of the concerns we’re seeing, and we’ve heard here,” he said.

As for the 2023 parking study update, some of its suggestions may be easier to implement than others, the manager said, citing a call in that study for the town to consolidate its parking enforcement and fees under the oversight of borough police instead of the town parking authority, a suggestion that sounds simple but could be complex to do.

“There are several layers to the parking study, that will lead to other conversations that need to be explored, but we’re not disregarding the parking study. We will be working with the parking study to inform us on how to move forward with several different concerns that we’re hearing,” Ernst said.

Lansdale’s borough council next meets at 7 p.m. on April 16 with various council committees starting at 6:30 p.m. on May 7, all at the borough municipal building, 1 Vine Street. For more information visit www.Lansdale.org.

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