No Broadway entrance at new Dunkin’ Donuts
The planned Dunkin’ Donuts shop at the site of the former Planet Wings restaurant in Midtown will have vehicle access only from Prince Street, not Broadway.
“There will not be any vehicular ingress and egress off of Broadway,” Kingston Planning Director Suzanne Cahill said at a Planning Board meeting this week.
“That was done for pedestrian safety, and ... they (developer Sardinha Brands Inc. of Laconia, N.H.) felt it works very well for them,” Cahill said.
Sardinha Brands’ plan calls for demolishing the building at 500 Broadway where Planet Wings operated until February and building a 1,300-square-foot Dunkin’ Donuts building in its place.
Dunkin’ Donuts will close its location at 575 Broadway, less than a quarter-mile away, when the new shop opens.
In addition to putting up a new building on the Planet Wings site, Sardinha Brands plans to erect a marker on the property to indicate it was the location of Kingston’s main post office from 1908 until 1969.
The post office was demolished in 1969 and 1970, and a Jack-inthe-Box fast-food restaurant was built on the site soon after. The site later was occupied by an ice cream shop before Planet Wings opened in 1996.
Jeff Schiller, project engineer for the Dunkin’ Donuts construction, told the Planning Board the
business will have a bike rack, employee parking away from the building, and a traffic pattern intended to minimizing the chances of people walking in the path of vehicles.
“There was concern about pedestrians traveling across the drive-thru aisle,” he said.
The plan states 65 percent of the shop’s business is expected to be conducted at a drive-thru window.
Cahill said the proposal is expected to be on the Planning Board agenda again in May.
Sardinha Brands has been operating Dunkin’ Donuts shops in the Hudson Valley for 13 years.
Dunkin’ Donuts — popular
not only for its donuts but also its coffee and several breakfast and lunch sandwiches — currently operates two shops in Kingston: the one at 575 Broadway that will relocate, and another at 295 Wall St. in the Uptown business district. There also are two Dunkin’ Donuts shops in the neighboring town of Ulster: at 585 Ulster Ave. and 1285 Ulster Ave.
The new Dunkin’ Donuts’ hours are proposed to be 5 a.m. to 10 p.m. seven days a week.