Immaculate Conception High School’s football players may no longer need to cross two wooden footbridges spanning Nishuane Brook to reach their field house, if municipal officials approve plans presented by the school.
The Historic Preservation Commission heard an application last Thursday night to demolish the current field house, originally designed as a 2.5-story dwelling. Had the HPC found that the house met any of the criteria for nomination as a local historic landmark, the commission could have nominated the property to temporarily shield it from destruction, but commission members took no action to prevent the demolition.
However, the house won’t be going anywhere for the time being, since it’s football season and the Zoning Board has yet to give the green light to plans for a new building.
The board is tentatively scheduled to hold its first hearing about the project on Wednesday, Oct. 15, Immaculate Conception’s attorney, James Lott Jr., told The Times.
The old house, which has been used as a field house since 1941, is in poor shape, and when it was built it was intended for use by a family, not a football team, Lott said.
"It’s just an old structure and it’s tough to maintain," said Sean Morris, Immaculate’s athletic director. "It’s an old house, and it has an old house’s problems." Lott estimated that the building could be as much as 90 years old.
The Immaculate Lions use the house to store "tons of equipment," and the building contains a coaches’ meeting room plus locker rooms both for the home team and any visiting teams. Immaculate’s 50 or so football players, who are in grades nine through 12, are making use of the house throughout football season, which runs, including practice drills, from mid-August to Thanksgiving Day, when Immaculate squares off with its traditional rival, Glen Ridge High School.
"If you put 50 high school boys into a building, it’s going to take a little bit of a beating," Morris said.
The new field house would stand at around 34 feet tall, falling just under the R-1 One Family Zone’s height limit of 35 feet. The new two-story field house would be situated on the other end of Codey Field, off Sears Place, from the existing house, which is on Draper Terrace.
The building would be accessible by car using a driveway off Sears Place that would lead to an eight-space parking lot, according to planning officials.
Among other things, the one-story section of the new building would house locker, meeting and weight rooms, a coach’s office and a concession stand. Meanwhile, three squash courts and a spectator area would occupy the two-story portion of the new field house.
"It would be tremendous for our school, and tremendous for our kids to go to an upgraded field house," said Morris. He said he hoped the high school’s athletic program would grow and flourish thanks to the investment.
The Zoning Board would need to grant the high school, a Catholic coed institution opened in 1925 on Cottage Place, a variance for the project to go forward, since field houses are not a permitted use in the zone. A number of other variances are also required for several reasons, ranging from the parking lot being situated between the building and the street, to the field house being too close to the field’s eastern boundary.
These plans to raze and replace the field house "were in the works" before Morris became the athletic director in 2005, he said.
Razing the existing residence and building a new field house at the same location could be an expensive, if not impossible, proposition, Lott told The Times. The existing house is on a 100-year floodplain, and it could be tough convincing the Department of Environmental Protection to sign off on a new building at that site, Lott said.
To do so, the school would need to come up with a management plan for "displaced floodwater" and the DEP could require that the building be elevated or have some other special design that could be pricey.
