Schilp & Co. – Commercial and investment real estate for Chester, Mendham, and all Morris County

Going Modern While Looking Colonial

BY JOHN HOLUSHA

The Mill Ridge Farm office complex in Chester, N.J., looks like an old mill and farm buildings.

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 2005

CHESTER, N.J. – This borough of 1,600 people in western Morris County is about 45 miles from Manhattan and a world away. It has Colonial roots and a rural small-town character, and it wants to stay that way. That was why a developer, KJW Developers of Gladstone, N.J., that wanted to put up office buildings on a prime site near the town’s core found itself building structures that resemble an old mill and a barn instead of the glass and steel buildings that carpet the former dairy farms of Parsippany and Rockaway Townships in the northern part of the county.

“We have a historic overlay to our zoning to preserve the character and nature of downtown,” said Dennis S. Verbaro, the mayor of the borough of Chester, which traces its lineage to a municipality formally established in 1799. “it takes a lot of effort to preserved the colonial look.” John J. Schilp, of Schilp & Company, a real estate brokerage firm that specializes in land development issues, said, “The site was originally zoned for light industrial, and a developer wanted to put in self-storage, but the town objected.” It was thought that the rows of low concrete buildings with metal garage like doors would mar the town’s Main Street, where even private homeowners are encouraged to use authentic colonial-era colors when they repaint or remodel.

After a change of land owners, a year and a half of negotiations and 19 zoning variances, the storage project evolved into what is now called Mill Ridge Farms. On a 10-acre site, it has three 16,000-sqaure-foot office buildings that are thoroughly modern inside, but which look somewhat like traditional farm structures from the outside. The first building, intended to look like the water-driven mills that processed grain in an earlier era in this hilly country, has a stone façade, a steeply pitched roof with dormers, traditional four-pane windows with exterior castings and wooden doors. To enhance the authenticity, a stone-lined pond is adjacent to the building.

The second structure, which is intended to look like a barn, though it has more windows than a barn would have, is farther back from the road. Behind that, a third buildings is planned that is to look like a large rambling farm house. The modern interiors of the buildings can be subdivided into smaller offices that command $22 to $25 a square foot, compared with $16 to $18 a square foot in converted houses, which have often been used for offices in the region. Many of the tenants who have signed leases, brokers said, are self-employed individuals who can choose where they work.

Finally, at the back of the site, farthest from Main Street, will be five new single-family houses. The office space is being marketed to the self-employed who have moved into the area and do not want to commute to office complexes in Parsippany and Morristown. “These are small offices to get people out of the home offices without adding a commute,” said Sig Schorr, an associate of Mr. Schilp, who helped put the Mill Ridge deal together. This project is likely to be the end of office development in Chester, no matter how well disguised. “The completion of this project will have met our need for offices,” Mayor Verbaro said. Future commercial development, he said, is likely to focus on retailing. Development in all its forms has become a heated issue in what is left of rural New Jersey. It is especially intense around here, because the area is in the state’s Highlands Region, where under a law passed last year development is being severely limited to preserve open land and the quality of the water supply.

Although the borough of Chester is in an area where development is generally permitted, the surrounding Chester Township is in the preservation area, where development is severely restricted. These borough township combinations are not uncommon in the northwestern part of the state. They came into being as the more heavily populated communities – which became the boroughs – had to install municipal water and sewage systems in the 1920’s and 30’s. The surrounding farmers, who would not have benefited from the improvements and declined to pay for them, split off as separate municipalities – the townships. While Chester borough is a compact 1.45 square miles and filled mostly with single-family homes, the township is a sprawling 29.3 square miles of rolling fields, woodlands and widely spaced housing.

Seeing what has happened in other parts of the state where housing development has led to a scramble for commercial development to pay for schools, roads and other services, township officials have fought to save open space and keep costs under control. “This is cutting edge stuff,” said Benjamin L. Spinelli, the mayor of Chester township, speaking of the efforts to limit development. He said the township had used state programs to acquire land, sought gifts of land from prominent families and reached farm preservation deals in which a land owner is paid in return for a permanent deed restriction preventing development. In these deals, the land owner gets to keep the property, even if it is not used as a farm. Indeed, there is a question whether conventional farming is practical in the area. The surviving farmers practice something local residents call agritainment, which combines growing crops with hay rides, pick-your-own events, animal petting and other kinds of rural entertainment for paying visitors. Mr. Spinelli said 43 percent of the land had already been protected when the Highlands Act put 86 percent of the township in the core preservation area. “The town remains a nice place to live and the demand for services is kept down,” he said.