Glassboro takes another revitalization step

In April 1999, Nick L. Petroni walked to the Dumpster near the Glassboro building that housed his accounting practice and found a body inside.

The grisly discovery, during a local crime wave, led Petroni and other downtown business owners to question whether they should relocate. They took their concerns to then-Mayor Alvin Shpeen and launched a years-long process of rethinking the borough.

On Monday, a pleased Petroni saw Glassboro take its latest step in the revitalization of its town center, which now features Rowan University student housing, retail, and, soon, a hotel.

But he had never expected that transformation to involve demolishing the building at 21 High St. where his grandparents lived in the 1930s, his mother started a beauty salon, and his father ran the accounting firm, Petroni & Associates.

The building was razed Monday to make way for a planned 1.75-acre town square where residents would be able to sit and relax and Glassboro could hold events such as the Italian festival that attracted about 5,000 people to a nearby site last year.

After the borough showed him its plans, Petroni agreed to sell the property to a developer about four years ago and relocated his firm across the street.

"As a little kid, I'd visit my grandparents there," Petroni said as he watched municipal workers tear down the nearly century-old structure. It was "more than just moving out of an office building."

Though it expects the square to be completed by spring 2014, the borough is not sure how it will fund the project, said Ronda Abbruzzese, director of business development. It has established a committee to lead a capital campaign, she said.

The park will link the spruced-up Rowan Boulevard - at 26 acres and $300 million the largest municipal redevelopment project in the state, Gloucester County Freeholder Heather Simmons said - with downtown.

To connect the campus to downtown was "one of the key objectives" of the redevelopment, Mayor Leo McCabe said.

That effort began with construction of the one-third-of-a-mile boulevard, which has created "more of an open field," Abbruzzese said. The town square would be "the crown jewel of all that."

For about 30 years, downtown Glassboro had been deteriorating. An Acme Market moved out to what had been farmland, the housing stock was poor, and there were drug issues, said John Hasse, who studies urban planning and is director of environmental studies at Rowan.

"It became this downward spiral. . . . People didn't want to go downtown because it felt scary," he said.

That changed when Glassboro and the university began to collaborate about 10 years ago, and, most crucially, with the public-private partnership that led to Rowan Boulevard.

"It's taken a long time, and now we're starting to see . . . these ideas coming to fruition," Hasse said.

A light-rail line linking Glassboro to Camden, and thus Philadelphia and New York, would make the borough an even more attractive place for homeowners and developers, he said.

The proposed line is undergoing an environmental-impact assessment. It could come to Glassboro as early as 2018, Hasse said, but funding has not been lined up.

In the meantime, the borough expects developers to complete a Marriott hotel on the boulevard by September and begin construction a few months later on a lot across the street that would feature retail, restaurants, and housing, Simmons said. Altogether, the redevelopment will involve 81 acres.