Bryn Mawr downtown plan closer to final approval

Bryn Mawr, a tired Main Line village where revitalization has been the talk for more than five years, finally has a new look - on paper anyway.

Last night, Lower Merion Township commissioners unanimously adopted a new zoning map for the town of 4,380 residents that, they said, will be a blueprint for reigniting the flagging business district while protecting adjacent neighborhoods.

"It is a very exciting opportunity," said Commissioner V. Scott Zelov, who chaired an ad hoc committee of civic and business leaders who worked for more than a year on drafting the new village-zoning strategy.

The four new zoning classifications will not take effect until an ordinance is adopted that spells out building standards for each, including allowable uses, heights and density. The commissioners expect to vote on that on June 18.

In a master plan prepared two years ago by a consultant hired by the township, Bryn Mawr's 1920s-era zoning regulations were identified as an obstacle to the kind of makeover now sought for the low-rise village.

The township envisions boutiques, cafes, offices and townhouses sharing the blocks along Lancaster Avenue, and, in the town square, a hotel as high as five stories rising on what is now a 1.9-acre parking lot just steps from the R5 train station.

The prospect of another month's delay in replacing the outdated building rules did not seem to dash the enthusiasm of some audience members at the Lower Merion Township building last night.

"This will be extremely instrumental in having Bryn Mawr revitalized," both economically and as a "cultural destination," Juliet Goodfriend, president of the Bryn Mawr Film Institute, told the commissioners before the vote. The nonprofit community theater was part of the ad hoc committee.

Seated on the other side of the room, a decidedly dour Elba Doorly offered her assessment in private: "I am very disappointed."

While Goodfriend eagerly awaits increased traffic to the institute's doorstep on Lancaster Avenue - Bryn Mawr's commercial spine - Doorly worries about what the new zoning plan might attract to nearby Central Avenue, where she and her husband live.

Their two-story brick rowhouse, in Doorly's family for nearly 30 years, is one of just three still occupied on Central. Seven sit vacant, presumably to be demolished as 18 neighboring homes were in summer 2006.

Their owners all sold their rowhouses and twins to Bryn Mawr Hospital's real estate division. The hospital wants to build a garage on Central, along with houses and possibly shops or other commercial enterprises.

The new map puts Central - once an everybody-knows-everybody, affordable neighborhood in one of the most affluent communities in Pennsylvania - in a zoning category that allows for a variety of residential and nonresidential uses.

That will better ensure that the street ultimately returns to a residential neighborhood, the commissioners told a skeptical Doorly. They rejected her request to approve an exclusively residential zoning classification for Central.

Zelov and others said parking and lot-size requirements for residentially zoned areas would preclude building the same number of homes on Central that were there long before township zoning was implemented.

To help protect Central from becoming lined with storefronts under the new village zoning, the commissioners said they are prepared to limit the number of off-site public parking spaces for any new development there to 10. With such a restriction, Zelov said, "stand-alone retail is extremely unlikely, if not impossible" on that street.

Doorly wasn't buying it.

"Allowing the rebuilding of a residential neighborhood is not the same as ensuring it," she told the commissioners.

Without zoning that specifically prohibits anything but residences on Central, what could be built around her home "is very unpredictable," Doorly said. "And that is my agony."