Charleston’s Board of Architectural Review voted unanimously Wednesday to approve the design of the building The Beach Co. plans for the Sergeant Jasper site near Colonial Lake, The Post and Courier reported.
The vote was a preliminary approval. It lets the project at 310 and 322 Broad St. move forward on schedule, though the board wants the architects to adjust some design details before the plan comes back for another review, according to the newspaper.
The vote follows years of fighting over what should replace the 14-story apartment tower. The Post and Courier has called the redevelopment the city’s most controversial in decades.
What will be built
Joe Antunovich of Antunovich Associates of Chicago presented the design. He said it drew on Charleston landmarks such as the People’s Building at the other end of Broad Street and the Francis Marion Hotel.
The building, one of the largest the board has ever reviewed, would include 25,000 square feet of ground-floor retail space and 75,000 square feet of offices along Barre Street. It would hold 222 apartments, slightly fewer than earlier proposals, which left room for a fifth-floor terrace, an outdoor pool and a fitness center, the newspaper reported.
Public comment was light. Four people spoke: two residents of the Charlestowne neighborhood and two representatives of the city’s main preservation groups. Each urged the board to study the materials closely, including the choice of cast stone rather than natural stone.
“It’s just critical that this project achieve the highest level of excellence in the details,” said Kristopher King of the Preservation Society of Charleston, according to The Post and Courier. “Any mistake is going to be magnified.”
Antunovich said he recently showed city planning staff a sample of the cast stone beside a piece of limestone, and hardly anyone could guess which was natural.
“It’s almost imperceptible, the difference,” he said.
Board member Jay White said the facade might look too perfect. “I would suggest you monkey around with ways to disturb that a little bit,” he said.
How it got here
The Beach Co. owns the Sergeant Jasper, a 159-foot tower built in 1950. The company began emptying its 220 apartments in 2014 to make way for redevelopment, The Post and Courier reported at the time.
Its first plan, a comprehensive rezoning known as a planned unit development, would have allowed three buildings of four to seven stories on the 6.4-acre site, with 454 apartments and 35,000 square feet of retail space, including a grocery store. Opponents objected to the density and the grocery store. In early 2015, so many people turned out for a Planning Commission hearing that the commission could not meet, the newspaper reported.
The company then switched to a high-rise allowed under the site’s existing zoning. The review board asked for a lower tower, then voted 3-2 against the lower version. The Beach Co. sued, arguing the board had overstepped its bounds by effectively rezoning the site, The Post and Courier reported.
Court-ordered mediation did not produce a deal. Circuit Judge J.C. Nicholson then ruled in the company’s favor, in a decision that undercut the board’s power to adjust a building’s height, the newspaper reported.
City Council, The Beach Co. and the board then agreed to a settlement that sets the building’s height and general size, according to the newspaper. A separate zoning change will let the project be mostly residential.
Mayor John Tecklenburg told the newspaper in December that the most important part of the deal for the city was having Nicholson’s ruling set aside, restoring the board’s legal footing. Created in 1930, the board was the first of its kind in the nation, the newspaper reported.
“The lawsuit really put the BAR in jeopardy,” Tecklenburg said, “and that’s what our whole sense of place has been built upon for the last 100 years, so that’s important.”
What comes next
John Darby, who leads The Beach Co., has said the company expects to tear down the existing building this summer, the newspaper reported. A temporary tower the company built on property known as St. Mary’s Field will take over the cellphone equipment now on the Sergeant Jasper’s roof.
Darby told The Post and Courier in December that he would be proud of the final building but would also remember the high costs involved.
“We’re playing with the cards we were dealt with making it the best building we can make it,” he said.
