THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 7, 1996 TAG: 9604050172
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 04 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY BILL REED, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 69 lines
A move is under way to close 8th Street between Atlantic and Pacific avenues to make room for a three-story, 600-space parking garage with an array of ground floor retail shops facing the Oceanfront.
An application to close off the street moved successfully through the Planning Commission this week and will advance to the City Council for final approval.
Mark Wawner of the city's Economic Development Department said the undertaking is a public-private venture wherein a private developer will build the garage and lease the top two floors to the city for use as a public parking garage.
The first floor will be turned over to hotel and restaurant owner Vern Burlage, who is expected to lease 10,000 square feet of Atlantic Avenue frontage for retail space and use the left over parking spaces in connection with his various Oceanfront businesses.
The closure of 8th Street will provide Burlage with additional parking spaces that would be lost to him through the garage construction.
The project developer, said Wawner, is Ellis-Gibson Development Co. of Virginia Beach.
Ellis-Gibson also has been in the process of accumulating property and commitments from retail entertainment companies to build an ambitious shopping and theater complex on Baltic Avenue, near Laskin Road.
That project has been stalled by pending litigation over rights to certain parcels near the intersection, city tourism officials said.
The 8th Street development would provide the city with its first municipal multilevel parking structure at the Oceanfront, said Wawner, who helped engineer the deal.
``It'll provide 600 parking spaces, and it gets built for us,'' he said. ``We would never be able to buy land in the resort area. It's a creative way of getting parking in the resort.''
The city already operates four ground-level municipal lots at 4th, 19th and 25th streets during the summer and early fall. A fifth lot at 31st Street is now being leased by Starship Ice, an ice skating rink franchise with headquarters in Richmond.
The 8th Street project comes along at a time when a recently concluded Pacific Avenue Corridor Study recommends dressing up Pacific Avenue, slowing down traffic and encouraging visitors to park their cars and either ride Oceanfront trolleys or walk to resort strip destinations of their choice.
A planned resort parking survey has yet to be undertaken, said Henry Ruiz, who heads the city's Parking Systems Management office. The study would determine what sort of parking resources are available to accommodate incoming visitors during the peak tourist season at the Oceanfront. by CNB