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A rendering of the proposed building.
Nearing what should be the end of a 15-year saga to replace his parents’ demolished retail building at 31 Long Island Avenue, David Schiavoni unveiled a rendering of the one-story structure he intends to build there before the Historic Preservation and Architectural Review Board of Sag Harbor on March 23.
It features a central clock tower, a hipped roof with old-fashioned brackets, stucco lower siding and tongue-in-groove upper siding, black frames around its large storefront windows and five doorways into its retail spaces.
Schiavoni said the building has the same footprint, height and layout as the modest building that was torn down in 2008 to allow for a Keyspan groundwater remediation project at the former gas ball property next door. Besides the clock tower, he said the only difference in the layout will be a greater setback from the street to allow for a wider sidewalk and landscape planting,
The board took no action on the application after Schiavoni’s brief presentation except to set a required public hearing for its next meeting at 5 p.m. on April 13.
Two board members on the panel expressed approval. “I like the design,” Bethany Deyermond told Schiavoni. “I do remember what was there. This is an area where the train came in.”
“It looks like a station,” agreed the board’s chair, Steve Williams.
“I like that idea,” Deyermond said.
“I like it,” said board member Megan Toy. “I like that clock tower.”
“It’s been on Facebook for so long, everybody loves it,” Schiavoni said of the rendering. “I’ve had no complaints.”
The board’s historic architectural consultant, Zachary Studenroth, expressed some reservations.
“The village is not Disneyland,” he told Schiavoni. “This board focuses on preserving historical architecture but not constructing it from scratch,” which he described as “not a good look.” Someone walking down the sidewalk “might think that’s been there 120 years,” which he called “not a desirable objective.”
Toy argued that “it’s clear based on the materials it’s not a historic structure.”
Studenroth’s comments prompted Village Attorney Liz Vail to tell Studenroth “the reason that you feel that way is because they’re required and entitled to replace a preexisting, nonconforming structure … in place and in kind. That’s what they’re struggling with when they’re presenting this to you.”
The Schiavoni family, operating as VAC Enterprises, tried for years to win approval to erect a building larger than the original structure. The Planning Board since 2017 has resisted both three-story and a two-story versions and, last year, ruled that even a one-story version — designed to accommodate a 7-Eleven convenience store, not the small shops that had once occupied the site — constituted a “significant change” that required an environmental impact study.
On the basis of a 2008 letter to them from then-village attorney Fred W. Thiele Jr., in which Thiele said they could rebuild their structure in-kind and in-place without further review, the Schiavonis finally obtained a building permit in late October 2022 allowing them to recreate “the shell” of the original structure.
Neighborhood opponents, including developers Jay Bialsky and Adam Potter, rejected the validity of the Thiele letter and went to court to block the permit. They won a decision sending the case to the ZBA, which annulled the permit early this year. The ZBA ruled that the Schiavonis could rebuild what had been there but only for uses that were allowed in the original structure and that any plan had to be submitted to the HPARB for approval.
Schiavoni told the HPARB the building is 18 inches lower than the previously proposed one-story structure.
