Fate of Deer Park Tavern Site Still an Open Question

Whether the former Deer Park Tavern rises from the ashes—perhaps recast as an office building—will remain a question until at least September.

Roy Reeves, who saw his popular Katonah restaurant destroyed by fire in January, looked on Wednesday evening as the Bedford Zoning Board of Appeals tabled his request for a pair of variances.

The exceptions to Bedford's zoning laws would be needed to accommodate parking for a proposed 7,000-square-foot office building on the Deer Park Road land.

But ZBA Chairman David A. Menken, noting the need for an environmental assessment, postponed any action until Sept. 8, when the board next meets. Meanwhile, the public hearing he called to order Wednesday on the matter will remain open for comments.

At the hearing, the first since Reeves made public his consideration of an office building for the former tavern site, some neighbors professed surprise—and opposition.

"Roy has never come to me," complained Paul Gallagher, who lives on Deer Park Road immediately west of the Reeves property. "When I moved in, it was a restaurant," he said. "I knew what I as getting into."

Saying it represented a "significant change" in the property's use and character, Gallagher also called the proposed office building "a surprise to me."

"My initial opinion is very negative," he said.

Another neighbor, Alfred H. Green, said he would defer any comment—pro or con—then invoked the possible late-night uses to which "transients" might put an unattended office parking lot.

That parking lot, if not its potential for unsavory after-hours intrigue, has landed Reeves before two Bedford regulatory bodies: the planning board, which oversees town land-use policies, and the zoning board, which can grant exceptions to them. He must still go before the Wetlands Control Commission.

He's represented before these bodies by David Sessions, a planner with Kellard Engineering & Consulting in Armonk. At Wednesday's ZBA hearing, Sessions presented the same plans he unveiled at a planning board meeting last month. They call for a two-story office building, with each level roughly 3,500 square feet in area, requiring parking for 28 cars.

Reeves owns adjoining parcels on Deer Park Road, just off Route 35, near Route 22. One parcel, closest to the road, is zoned for commercial use, the other for one-acre residential.

To make the office building possible without going though a wholesale rezoning of his property, Reeves would need to obtain both an area variance and a tougher-to-achieve use variance, each related to the office building's parking requirements.

The 28-space lot would largely occupy the commercial lot but intrude slightly into Reeves' residential property. That creates parking less than 25 feet from a residential zone, requiring an area variance, and a commercial lot in that zone, dictating the use variance.

The residential lot, however, as home to the restaurant's septic system leach fields, was already being used commercially, Sessions argued. Moreover, he said, while the parking area encroaches on Reeves' nominally R-1-zoned land, it remains "50-plus feet from a 'true' residential boundary."

Asked by Menken whether Reeves had "definitively decided" to erect an office complex on his property rather than rebuild the restaurant, Sessions said, "No." Reeves, who attended the hearing but did not formally speak, repeated that assertion later outside the meeting room, saying he was keeping his options open.