ALLENTOWN, Pa. — A project to build more than 100 apartments in a vacant East Allentown lot — a plan approved more than four years ago — still is on ice.
Allentown’s planning commission in February 2024 granted developer Joe Colasuonno two more years to start his Central Parks Apartments project at 605-665 Wahneta St.
It first approved his project in June 2021.
The agenda for the commission’s meeting Tuesday afternoon shows Paul McNemar, a project manager with RETTEW, will seek another extension request for the project.
The plans for Central Park Apartments include 126 apartment buildings across a dozen buildings in a lot that sits just north of the former Allentown State Hospital site, where another developer is planning a massive redevelopment project.
City Center, Allentown’s most prominent developer, wants to build more than 600 townhomes on the 195-acre property.
City Center's initial plans for its Northridge development called Wahneta Street to be extended through the Central Park Apartments property.
Its plans also include offices, a “micro-hospital” and other facilities. And Allentown School District is set to build a new school for students in kindergarten through eighth grade after buying a 16.6-acre lot on the east side of Northridge.
City Center is looking to extend Wahneta Street to create another access point off Hanover Street for residents and visitors, but its initial plans showed that extension would cut through the Central Park Apartments property.
Wahneta Street now dead-ends about a quarter-mile south of Hanover Street, just before it reaches the proposed building site.
Colasuonno and City Center are working to coordinate their plans for the adjacent properties, but those talks are “ongoing,” McNemar said Friday.
Colasunno plans to ask for another two-year extension at Tuesday’s meeting, according to McNemar.
Central Park amusements
The property that could one day house hundreds of residents was the Central Park “trolley park,” which ran from the 1890s through 1951.
Trolley parks were established by transit companies to boost ridership; they were precursors to amusement parks.
The Lehigh Valley Traction Company bought the Central Park property in 1895 and helped push attendance past 650,000 people in 1911, according to Robert M. Reinbold, who documented much of the history of the property and Ritterville in East Allentown.
An arsonist nearly brought Central Park’s storied run to an end on Christmas Day 1950.Local historian Robert M. Reinold
By the mid-1910s, the Central Park attraction included a 2,500-seat theater, restaurant, carousel, miniature railway, a penny arcade and a human roulette wheel.
And Central Park featured a photo gallery 115 years ago, according to Reinold.
The trolley park continued to grow and added a roller coaster in 1927, four years after Dorney Park installed its first coaster.
An arsonist nearly brought Central Park’s storied run to an end on Christmas Day 1950.
That fire — the park’s seventh in less than two decades — burned down some of its major attractions. Another fire in August 1951 put the final nail in its coffin, Reinold’s writings state.
Some of the Central Park property has been developed — most notably the former Bennett Toyota lot — but the part where Colasuonno hopes to build 12 apartment buildings is an urban forest.
