With renovations to the existing Burger King and a brand new Taco Bell on the same property proceeding through the review process at roughly the same time, Town of New Paltz Planning Board members are hoping to see a bit more coordination between the two, particularly with regard to exterior design.
The Burger King at 238 Main Street opened nearly 40 years ago and is set to undergo its first renovation and remodel since the now-discontinued BK Stacker was a gleam in the King’s eye. The Burger King, a franchise of Edison, New Jersey-based Devs Foods, LLC, and owned by Sanjay Patel of NP Rest 5994, LLC will not see any site plan changes as part of its renovation, with the exterior of the building undergoing roof replacement, with new siding, signage, and canopies also in the works.
Patel owns the property at 238 Main Street, which has an oversized parking area on its south side upon which a Taco Bell, should it come to pass, will sit. That fast food restaurant would include a single story 2,192-square-foot building with 32 indoor seats, ten outdoor seats, and a drive thru. If the location sounds fast food familiar, the Taco Bell would join Burger King, plus a nearby McDonald’s on the northbound side of Main Street.
The Taco Bell project is a franchise of Haza Bell, a division of the Haza Group, a Sugarland, Texas-based company with a focus on quick service restaurants. To date, Haza Bell is the franchise holder for 144 Taco Bell locations across the United States.
Though technically adjourned from the agenda and rescheduled for the Monday, August 12 meeting of the planning board, a public hearing on the Taco Bell project was briefly opened at the July 8 meeting to allow local residents to share their concerns.
Darren Read has lived on a property behind the Burger King since 1993, with his wife, and later his daughter and granddaughter. He said he’d spoken to neighbors, all of whom share similar concerns. They say it’s noisy late at night, and with outdoor seating plans at the Taco Bell, that’s likely to worsen.
Burger King’s dine-in hours end at 10 p.m. seven days a week, with the drive-thru open every day until midnight, except on Fridays and Saturdays when it closes at 1 a.m. Taco Bell has yet to post anticipated opening hours, though Keith Brown, an attorney with Melville legal firm Brown Altman & DiLeo, LLP, said dine-in and drive-through hours were planned for 7 a.m. until midnight, with outdoor seating from 11 a.m. until 11 p.m.
That may not be music to Read’s ears.
“It gets really loud, and they don’t have outdoor seating,” Read said of Burger King. “It’s right behind my house. And there’s going to be all kinds of college kids out there until one o’clock in the morning.”
Brown said the Taco Bell plans should mitigate those concerns.
“I would note that the outdoor seating is in the front of the building, which will help attenuate any sound that comes from that,” he said.
Joe Marianek, co-commissioner of the town’s Historic Preservation Commission (HPC), said he hoped the Taco Bell would take design pains to “improve the facade in terms of localizing it for a historic appropriate mix,” pointing to the efforts made by McDonald’s during a recent renovation, as well as other local fast food restaurants in other communities.
“There are other examples of fast food, fast casual chains that have localized in the area, specifically, a Taco Bell in Ellenville with a pitched roof and grey siding,” Marianek said. “There are plenty of examples of McDonald’s doing it in Hyde Park and New Paltz, which we’re all familiar with, if we drive down the Main Street.
Marianek has a professional background in design, with a focus on signage and branding. Two decades ago he designed the signage for the original Shake Shack kiosk in Madison Square Park, and then continued working with the client as they expanded their reach through New York City, and beyond.
“One of the things we did as the design team was to localize the signage for different locations and franchises around the world, whether that be Brooklyn; Paris, France; or St.Petersburg, Russia, which is of course closed,” Marianek said. “But there are thousands of Shake Shacks now, and they all look different. They also reflect the character and the spirit of the space from materiality to scale. McDonald’s is clearly already the (local) precedent for scale and materiality.”
Fellow Historic Preservation Commission co-commissioner Susan DeMark said she reviewed the Taco Bell plans and found it “very bland.”
“We’ve had some success as HPC in working with people to put some kinds of local New Paltz references, even if it would be like one part of the front where you have a reference to stone, which is what we worked with Hampton Inn (at 4 S. Putt Corners Rd.) to do. Something that really says this isn’t one of 3,000 places Taco Bell is going go in, in what is as close to a strip as we got.”
Design has become a sticking point for both the Taco Bell and Burger King projects, with planning board members sharing similar concerns to the Historic Preservation Commission.
Planning board deputy chair Lyle Nolan said he would rather see monument signs than proposed pole signs, which would adhere to town building code.
“I think making it larger than our code allows is wrong,” Nolan said. “I think we have a sign law for a purpose. We want to downplay that kind of information and make our town more hospitable. It’s a transition from historical village up into modern world, I get it, but I don’t think we have to announce that break with a pole sign.”
Planning board member Jane Schanberg agreed.
“We went through this with McDonald’s, and I think that we should look at that as precedent,” she said. “It looks very good. We worked very, very hard with them for a very long time. Arguably, this new piece of renovation where we have two fast food restaurants adjacent to each other being renovated at the same time gives us a really good opportunity to have a very good looking restaurant hub…And I think any kind of signage decisions should not be made on a piecemeal basis. There should be signage decisions for the entire plot with both restaurants.”
Schanberg added that monument signs are not going to be missed on a stretch of road that traffic doesn’t ordinarily fly through.
“That’s not a speedy place,” she said. “People go through there very slowly, so they’re going to see whatever’s there. It’s not like that they need something gigantic, like Las Vegas.”
Fellow board member Jennifer Welles drew a more local comparison as something New Paltz should seek to avoid.
“I keep on thinking about driving into Poughkeepsie,” Welles said. You have these places that look very hodgepodge of these restaurants that are on the same property, but there’s no cohesiveness and it makes it seem very chaotic.”
Brown, whose firm represents Haza Bell, said he hoped to see the process move forward, adding that many of the suggestions heard at the meeting had already been seen to in the most recent plans.
“(The design) is quite localized,” he said. “There is nothing like this in the area, in the Hudson Valley or in the Tri-State area, I dare say. Just look at the outdoor seating. They put a nice patio with overhead on it. And I think it’s quite handsome. We all know that architecture is quite subjective, but based on the comments that we received from this board, we have gone through great lengths to augment the architecture, not have a standard prototype look, and in fact, have a very distinctive localized look for this particular restaurant.”
Brown added that the location of the fast food chain would not detract from New Paltz’s historic architecture.
“We’re not in a historic district,” he said. “We’re in a transition area as we leave to go toward the Thruway.”
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