Bricktown Urban Design Committee approves parking garage application

Renderings by Melissa Shelton Goldstein of MMPartnership.

Pamela Grady
2/14/2007

The Bricktown Urban Design Committee today approved an application for a Bricktown Certificate by Martin Goldstein, MM Partnership for Bricktown Canal Properties Inc. and Harding & Shelton LLC to construct a multi-story parking garage at 3 E Reno Ave.
The application also includes a request to construct an elevated crossover above an alley between the garage and two existing buildings.

The committee approved a traditional two- and four-story option for the project as well as a crossover.

Store-front retail space for advertising on part of the garage’s lower level of will be a possible component of the project. Sixty-five parking spaces will be available per story. Seventy-five percent of those spaces will be available for general use while the remaining spaces will be available for office parking and retail patrons.

MM Partnership’s Martin Goldstein estimated the project could “roughly” go for $10,000 to $12,000 per parking space.

The parking garage is part of a mixed-used project with two existing buildings on California Avenue owned by Diversified Historic Properties Inc.

One of the buildings is often referred to as The Red Ball building, 2 E California, and is on the national historical registry. The other building, 12 E California Ave., houses Zio’s Italian Kitchen.

“They (the two existing buildings) are going to be renovated into mixed-use -- restaurants, residential and retail,” John Shelton of Harding Shelton Inc. said.

“Our goal was to get this (garage) approval, and now we’ll want to get the entire project moving forward in the most sensible fashion,” Goldstein said. “What the approval today allows us to do is move through planning and then submit our drawings to the building department. Once they’re approved we’ll begin construction. There are still a couple of hoops we have to go through, but we’re pushing forward.”

The above-the-alley, elevated crossover will be the connector between the office level of the two existing buildings and the parking garage’s upper level.

“We have working on this for months and we had identified this as an important part of the success of the project because parking obviously is no secret issue in Bricktown,” Goldstein said.