Nearly a full city block of Remington will be redeveloped as the setting for apartments, offices and retail space, under a plan unveiled Thursday by Seawall, a development company that has been working in the area for 15 years.
‘Sisson East’ is the working name of a multi-building development planned for the area bounded by 28th Street on the south, Sisson Street on the west, 29th Street on the north, and Hampden Avenue on the east.
During a presentation to Baltimore’s Urban Design and Architecture Advisory Panel (UDAAP), development team members said the project would be a combination of existing buildings and new construction.
Preliminary plans call for:
- About 200 apartments, mostly one-bedroom units and some two-bedroom units, with about 9,000 square feet of amenity space and terraces and one parking space per unit. The apartments would be located on the Hampden Avenue side of the property, in a building rising about six stories, with its upper levels set back from the street.
- About 140,000 square feet of office space in a six-level building on the 29th Street side of the site. The building would have five levels of office space over one level of retail space and there would be one parking space for every 800 square feet of office space.
- About 50,000 square feet of ground-level retail space, some in the new office and residential buildings and some resulting from the adaptive reuse of three existing buildings near the corner of Sisson and 28th streets. Some of the retail space would surround a new central plaza in the middle of the site.
- A six-level parking garage with space for about 470 cars and 47 bikes, “wrapped” by the residential and office buildings. The parking would be available to tenants of the apartment and office buildings and to patrons of the retail space, and the garage would be accessible from both 28th and 29th streets.
Other members of the development team include Blank Slate, a minority-owned development company headed by Alex Aaron; BCT Design Group, the architect, and Mahan Rykiel Associates, the landscape architect.
Members of the design review panel were supportive of the design approach taken by the development team. Much of the discussion centered on which buildings the development team wanted to save and recycle and which it planned to tear down and replace.
Panel member Osborne Payne said he thought the buildings along Sisson Street could be torn down, but panel member Pavlina Ilieva said they could be useful in knitting the rest of the development to the area and not making it seem like an entirely new development.
Seawall partner Jon Constable told the review panel that Sisson East builds on everything his company has previously done in Remington.
“Fifteen years ago, we did Miller’s Court, a couple of blocks east of this project in Remington and we have been part of the neighborhood ever since,” he said. “It’s been a really cool journey and a really cool partnership with the neighborhood and the community groups.”
In many ways, Sisson East is “the culmination of 15 years of really being a community member” and it’s “the largest project we’ve ever done,” Constable said. “It really fits on the Remington neighborhood plan,” a planning document that has been approved by the city, and “it’s kind of like the next iteration…We are super, super excited about this project.”
