in the basement at 1729.
Some more of the floor of the artwork at 1729.
That's another picture of the basement.
We also shot the back room and the tattooing areas in the basement of 1729.
Parking garage across the street. And here is 1727, which is currently empty.
Again, it's going to have pretty much the same setup as downstairs.
We have the upstairs rooms, the upstairs room.
and these are the rooms are downstairs that are still in the process of being developed
but the shop is empty we're waiting up zoning that the stairs that goes from upstairs to downstairs
that's a little outside patio here's the letter which was circulated to
the community association center city residents association we did meet with them
on September 27th at 7 o'clock.
And here is a certificate of mailing
and here is a letter of non-opposition
from the Center City Residents Association.
But commissioners, this new studio
will have the same hours as the 1729.
1729 has approximately 11 employees
It is anticipated that 1727 would have an additional seven employees, and they all don't work at the same time.
80% of the appointments are by appointment only.
We have 20% of individuals that walk in.
All of our tattoo artists have the city tattoo license from the Department of Health, as well as the blood pathogen certificate from the city of Philadelphia.
We do have just a regular lighting in the front.
We have trash pickup as previously explained.
And at this time, we don't have any plans for any additional signage.
and that that ends my presentation and if anyone has any questions myself or the architect or the
proprietor more than happy to answer you want to have your testimony adopted by the uh the owner
yes uh don salaroli are you on the line
This is someone
Oh, I have a hand up from Troy
Oh, Troy is the other proprietor. That's fine
Troy, can you state your name and address for the record, please?
uh mr temple can you hear me uh yes hi could you state your name and spell it please for
the court reporter uh yes troy t-r-o-y temple t-i-m-p-e-l right do you swear for him to tell
the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth yes proceed to cancel uh mr temple are you
with Mr. Salaroli, the proprietors
of the tattoo shop at
1729 South Street?
Yes, we are.
And Mr. Tim Pell,
have you heard my testimony
here today in reference to
the operation of the shop
hours and use?
And if you were to testify today,
would you adopt my testimony?
Absolutely.
Thank you, Mr. Tim Pell.
Thank you. Questions from the board?
No, Mr. Chairman.
No, Mr. Chairman.
Questions or comments from the virtual audience?
I see no further hands, Mr. Chair.
Planning Commission.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Good afternoon.
David Fecto, City Planning Commission.
The comprehensive plan recommends no change to the commercial mixed use of zoning at this location.
The applicant has shown that expanding the proposed body art services would have no more of an impact than the expansion of body art services would be expected to have.
So the city planning commission recommends the board grant the special
exception. Thank you.
MI 2022 003 468.
Mr. Chair, Mr. Chair, I'm sorry, this is Hillary.
Do you want Ms. Threet to pull up the provisos that were with the previous referral to incorporate them?
Do you want Ms.
Three to pull up the provisos that were with the previous?
She can do that.
She can do that.
I started to scribble them down, but I probably don't have them all.
Thank you.
Give me a second here.
Here we go.
there was no deliveries or trash pickup before 8 a.m. weekdays okay I see I see okay just leave
it up thank you at MI 2022-003-468-1727 South Street I vote yes with proviso no deliveries
or trash pickup before 8 a.m. weekdays and 9 a.m. weekends commercial trash pickup and trash stored
inside. Carol Tenere, yes, with provisos. Thomas Holloman, yes, with provisos. James Snell, yes,
with provisos. Jamal Shaheen, yes, with provisos. Thank you, counsel. Thank you very much,
commissioners. Have a good afternoon. Number four, MI 2022-003-384-341 North Front Street.
Rachel Pritzker is listed as the attorney. Letter of non-opposition from Central Delaware Advocacy Group. Letter of non-opposition from Council Member Mark Squiller.
Brandon Saverin will be rejoining as a panelist, sir.
Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman.
Good afternoon, Brandon. Could you state your name and spell it, please, for the court reporter?
Yes. Brandon Saverin, spelled B-R-A-N-D-O-N, S as in Sam, A, V as in Victor, R-A-N.
Great. Do you swear for him to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?
Yes, I do.
Counselor, could you identify your client, the relationship to the property?
Sure. So I represent John Scorsone, who is the owner of the subject property 341 North Front. I also represent, which I'll detail, the neighboring property owner, which is only relevant because this application would affect their lot lines as well.
Okay, thank you. Our vice chair has a few questions.
Hi, do you agree to waive the reading of the refusal and stipulate to its accuracy?
Yes, I do.
Have you emailed the exhibit packet with proof of ownership, tax compliance, a copy of the refusal or referral, photos under plans of the property, five days in advance of this hearing, and have you met with the RCO, and do you have a letter?
Yes, to all of the above, Madam Vice Chair.
Okay, great. You may proceed and begin to share your screen.
Thank you very much. Okay. All right. Good afternoon, members of the board. So I am here on a variance appeal regarding 341 North Front Street. Just to orient you a little bit, here is Columbus Boulevard.
and we are just below Callahill Street on a block of front which has homes that actually
interestingly have two street frontages. On the west they front on Front Street and on the right
they front on Water Street. As I'm going to show you in a moment one of the elements of this
appeal is a lot line relocation which would donate if you will a little of the applicant's
land to the owner of 339 North Front Street. That owner is Urban Metro Properties Inc. I also
represent them. So to dive into the refusal, there's a lot going on in this refusal. We're
in a number of overlays, as you can see on the top here, and we generated four refusals, although
I'll note they're all dimensional refusals, no use refusals. This is an application to renovate,
partially demolish, and then put a new addition on an existing single family home. So we have a
single family home, we will remain a single family home. I will walk you through each of
these refusals in a moment. Before I do that, just wanted to point out that we have a letter
of non-opposition from CDAG, who is the coordinating RCO. We also have, I believe,
non-opposition from the district councilman. We have here a letter of approval that will be
necessary if we proceed to building, which we intend to do, from the Philadelphia Historical
from the philadelphia historical commission i'll get into that in a moment as well
Commission. I'll get into that in a moment as well.
this is one image of the front and rear elevations of the proposed project
and looking at this you might think to yourself well that's a very tall building but what i want
to show you is that thanks to the hard work of our architect here we have this graphic which i
placed in my memo of law. Oh, and I'll add, by the way, the image I just showed you of the
elevations is also in my exhibits packet. But this image is in my memo of law in the exhibits packet,
and it shows you our building highlighted in yellow and some other buildings that are
immediately adjacent on our side of Front Street. And what you'll see is that our finished product,
But if you approve this variance and if we were to finish the project, it would really put us in line height-wise with most of our surrounding neighbors.
Again, we are the yellow block labeled 341 North Front.
I'll show you quickly.
These are two of our neighbors at 343 and 345 North Front.
This photo is also in my exhibit packet.
um you know we'd basically be building to this height um this is us to the to the right of those
taller buildings here currently um we'd be sort of chopping off i think what is currently the top
floor and adding two new floors and then 339 to our right um as i mentioned i also represent the
owners of that property i have a letter in my exhibit packet um that spells out their support
for our project. So let's go back to the refusal real quickly here. So first refusal of the four
listed here is for lot area. So one of the plans that we submitted to L&I that led us here is the
lot line relocation plan. There is already a party wall that separates 341 and 339 North Front Street.
And these are already two distinct legal parcels. The problem is that due to what I assume is a
surveying error from many years ago, the two properties, the party wall between them does not
line up with the legal boundary. And this is something that the survey district and L&I
wanted to see us correct. So while this is not really the crux of the project, if you will,
In the process of building this addition, we're going to fix the lot line by relocating it so it does run under the party wall.
And I believe that we'll be, therefore, seating about 40 square feet of space to 339 North Front in order to get that done.
As a result, in the refusal here, what the refusal tells you is that our lot at about 350 square feet would be smaller than it is now and well below the required lot area, 1440 square feet.
There's a hardship there in that if you look at the parcel map, which is also in the exhibit packet and is shown here on Atlas, you know, we really both before and after this relocation are pretty much the average sized lot on this block.
In fact, we may even be a touch larger than average.
Point is, on our side of Front Street on this block, only one of the 19 lots meets that 1440 square foot minimum.
So this is a very difficult code provision to comply with in this neighborhood.
It would basically cause the consolidation of these lots to be able to conform to that.
Therefore, that's a harsh. The next two items in the refusal are actually closely related.
So John Scorsone, who I mentioned is the owner of this property, owns a company called Solar America, and this is his home.
So John would like to put a solar collector on the roof to provide his own power for his electricity that he consumes in the house.
This is his business. It's also his personal passion and sort of the main driver in his life at this point.
So this is this is a passion project for him. And it's also about sustainability.
It just so happens that, as I showed you in my memo, you know, the amount of height that is required to sort of match up with the tallest buildings on the block would allow us to collect enough solar rays to provide meaningful power to the property.
to the property so the hardship with regard to height is that if we do not go above 38 feet
um so um the hardship with regard to
the codes maximum will be well below the average height of the block we also would have no
practical ability to collect sun rays with regard to the lack of the adequate solar collector setback
What I'm going to show you here is that we were asked on the top floor to hem in, basically put setbacks into the fourth floor, the planned fourth floor.
That request was made by the Architectural Committee of the Historical Commission.
Because we complied with it sort of for technical reasons, that meant that the solar collector was closer to the extremes of that fourth floor and it no longer conformed to the setback requirement for solar collectors.
And our initial proposal, it did conform to that requirement. But by listening to the demands of the Historical Commission, we were actually brought out of conformity with that rule on the setback of solar collectors.
And finally, with regard to the last refusal, we did not plan initially to have a roof deck.
In our initial proposal that was taken to the Historical Commission's Architectural Committee, we had no roof deck.
Instead, back to this zoning plan, the fourth floor came out flush to the building.
They asked us to push in that fourth floor in the front and rear, as I mentioned.
So that sort of created a dilemma. We were going to have space on top of the third floor roof on both sides. And we could either kind of make it uninhabitable or we could use it because it's going to be there anyway.
And we decided to turn that into roof decks. That's what triggered the fourth refusal. The hardship with regard to that refusal is the only way not to get that refusal, but to comply with the historical commission's demands is to make this unusable space.
That just seemed wasteful. Further, and I have some aerial photographs in the exhibit packet.
This is an aerial in front of you. If you look to both sides of our property, here we are.
I believe our building would be here. You can see that our neighbors have roof decks,
with the exception of 339 right next to us.
They seem to come out kind of very close
to the extreme front and rear building lines.
Sorry, extreme front building lines.
So our refusal there again
is that our roof deck wasn't set back far enough.
But our neighbors don't seem to conform to that rule.
The Historical Commission,
upon reviewing our revised proposal had no problem with how we were designing our roof deck.
Last thing I'll add, you'll see on this aerial, and you can also see on the zoning map in my packet,
that behind us is a very large parking lot, which I believe is slated at some point for the
construction of a condominium tower on at least part of it. In any event, it's zoned CMX3. So
So this means that the height of our building is not going to disturb anybody to the rear
because right now what's there is nothing and what would be allowed there by code would
be a much taller building.
So that's my presentation.
I have Rustin Aller from the architectural firm that designed the plans.
He can answer any questions you might have.
I have more architectural drawings and if you'd allow me, I'd like John Scorsone to
adopt my testimony okay let's get your client to raise his hand thank you john are you out there
could you could you raise your hand on zoom
mr scorzone has been allowed to speak sir okay could you state your name please and spell for
the court reporter yes it's john scorzone j-o-h-n-s-c-o-r-s-o-n-e right do you swear or
affirm to tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth i do proceed counsel
thank you mr chair john uh were you able to hear the full extent of my testimony today
i did and was it true and accurate yes and would you therefore be willing to adopt it as if it
were your own i would okay thank you questions from the board no mr chairman no mr chairman
no mr chairman no mr chairman no mr chairman no mr chairman questions or comments from the
No, Mr.
virtual audience see no further hands mr chair planning commission thank you mr chairman david
fecto city planning commission the comprehensive plan recommends no change to the residential
multi-family zoning at this location the unusually small lot sizes on this block present a clear