Should Centerville fire station be destroyed or rehabilitated?

FREMONT >> The Planning Commission on Thursday will consider whether an old firehouse in the city’s historic Centerville district should be demolished to make way for a major mixed-use project.

The city’s Historical Architectural Review Board last month recommended that a developer be required to preserve and rehabilitate Fire Station No. 6.

The Fremont City Council will have the final say on what happens to the fire station, which was built in 1954 before the city incorporated and decommissioned it in 2008 because it was deemed seismically unsafe. A replacement station was built on the corner of Central Avenue and Dusterberry Drive.

Sunnyvale-based SiliconSage Builders is proposing to erect 93 apartments, with 26,000 square feet of ground-floor retail, across several three- and fourstory buildings along Fremont Boulevard, between Parish Avenue and Peralta Boulevard. The project would also include 72 threestory townhouses between the apartments and Jason Way to the east.

The historical board’s recommendation would reconfigure the retail and housing building just north of the firehouse “to reduce upper-floor bulk,” resulting in space for 81 apartments instead of 93, reduce the retail space by 1,000 square feet, and keep the same number of townhouses.

People viewing the fire station from the street would see a high commercial floor instead of a three-story building immediately next to the fire station, and the apartments would be set back farther into the site, according to Joel Pullen, a city senior planner.

After the fire station is rehabilitated, its entrance would be on the southwestern side.

All of the other low-slung buildings along that section of Fremont Boulevard, some of which currently house restaurants and shops, would be razed.

The townhouses would range from 1,800 to 2,100 square feet and have threeand four-bedroom units, a city staff report says. All of the mixed-use buildings in the project would feature a mix of Mediterranean and Spanish Revival architectural styles

“With the exception of a small triangular site on Peralta Boulevard, the site comprises an entire city block,” the report states.

The fire station, which has not been used at all since going vacant, was determined in a 2007 historical study to be eligible for the California Register for its architectural significance.

The City Council, in an Oct. 3, 2017 meeting, recommended that the fire station be retained and rehabilitated by the developer and that the city retain ownership of the building so it could be used for some future public use, such as a preschool.

But later that month, a consultant found that keeping the firehouse and building the new development around it “would still result in a substantial adverse change” because of the razed buildings around it, “and the planned height and scale of the new construction.”

The rehabilitation of the firehouse will remove some of its defining features, such as a metal canopy at the rear, and an original metal staircase at the northwest corner, lessening its historic value, city reports said.

“What the Planning Commission and City Council will be deciding, if they want to approve the project as a whole, is whether it’s worth it to retain the fire station given that reduction in historical value,” Pullen said Tuesday.

The development was originally planned to be considered by the Planning Commission in late 2017, but after the October 2017 historical analysis, the city commissioned a full environmental impact report and worked with SiliconSage on revisions.

The Fremont Planning Commission meets on Thursday at 7 p.m., in City Council Chambers, 3300 Capitol Ave., Building A.