Advance Realty Investors joined local officials on Tuesday to mark the ceremonial groundbreaking for 399 luxury apartments at 1100 South Fifth St. in Harrison.
By Joshua Burd
Advance Realty Investors has broken ground on nearly 400 new apartments in Harrison, in what will be the latest addition to a stretch of the town’s waterfront redevelopment zone.
The firm joined local officials on Tuesday to mark the ongoing construction at 1100 South Fifth St., which sits just west of Red Bull Arena and a block from the Passaic River. It’s also just north of two multifamily properties with a combined 566 homes, which Advance has delivered in recent years as part of a 35-acre, master-planned area known as the Riverbend District.
The new site, which is slated to be complete in early 2023, will include 399 units and 5,000 square feet of retail space. March Associates is the project’s construction manager.
“One of the things that we always talk about is moving forward and keeping progress moving,” said Dan Cocoziello, principal and managing director of development at Advance. “That’s been our rallying cry the last 18 months — moving forward is really the only option — so today is a real testament with this groundbreaking that we are moving forward and we’re all moving forward together.”
Cocoziello thanked local officials who have helped shepherd some two decades of redevelopment planning in Harrison, which is anchored by a newly renovated PATH station. Those efforts have lured many well-known developers to the 1.3-square-mile town across from downtown Newark, resulting in the construction of thousands of homes over the past decade.
“This was Mayor McDonough’s dream and it’s coming true,” Harrison Mayor James Fife said Tuesday, referring to his predecessor, the late Raymond McDonough.
Advance’s projects in the town have included Steel Works, a collection of 286 apartments completed in 2017, and Cobalt Lofts, which added another 280 units to the Riverbend District about a year and a half later. Peter Cocoziello, the firm’s founder and CEO, noted that the pandemic delayed its latest project, but provided an opportunity to reconfigure the building to meet the needs of life after COVID-19.
That meant apartments with higher ceilings, more outdoor amenity space and expanded options for those working from home.
“We said let’s stop, let’s go back and look at this building really carefully,” he said, later adding: “All of that was totally redesigned and it was actually a blessing in disguise.”
Plans for the building call for some 72,000 square feet of amenity space, the developer said. Residents will also be within walking distance of the PATH station, which provides a 20-minute commute to Manhattan and a three-minute ride to Newark.
Advance’s plans for the Riverbend District include another roughly 2,000 units, the developer said. The Bedminster-based firm recently submitted its site plan application for those additional phases, with the goal of starting construction by late next year.
“It’s becoming a community that is being recognized by everyone,” Peter Cocoziello said.
