The Clarkstown Planning Board gave preliminary approval to the Palisades Center at Wednesday’s meeting to provide street level access to a Dick’s Sporting Goods to open on the second and third floors of the mall.
The new store will be sandwiched on the mall’s middle floors above Bed, Bath & Beyond and below Barnes & Noble. The plan calls for a 1,817-square-foot first floor vestibule and a 2,579-square-foot second floor vestibule to provide street level access.
The plan calls for Dick’s to take over empty stores no longer in business as well as some overflow parking area that Darrin Houseman, general manager of the Palisades Center, said doesn’t get used.
The group from the Palisades will meet with the Architectural & Landscape Commission Monday and return to the Planning Board Wednesday night to seek final approval. Houseman said they don’t have a date set yet for the store’s opening, although they’ve begun construction on it, minus the aspects still needing approval.
One issue the planning board had with the design is the transformers in the store are located underneath the escalators. Members of the board wanted to know about the safety of them in that location, as well as how a crew could get there if they needed to be worked on or removed. The board asked the Palisades group to provide a statement about the safety of the escalators.
The meeting was a public hearing, and the only member of the public to speak was Steven Levine of Congers who had some concerns about the addition to the mall.
“As a citizen and a taxpayer, I don’t think we are getting our value worth out of the mall, and what offends me is that in my mind, you don’t not continue to reward a bad actor,” he said.
Levine added that if the location needs more space, it should have to remove it from the top floor of the mall that is currently not being used for anything.
“If they are adding square footage to the building, it seems to me, let them take this square footage and physically remove it somewhere else in the building from that extra floor that was built,” he said.
