Arroway Expansion Plans Back at the Drawing Board

Given Arroway Chevrolet’s visibility on a key artery into Mount Kisco, aesthetics will influence any approval of the auto dealer’s bid to expand, the village planning board’s chairman made clear Tuesday.

In blunt language, Joseph Coseninto said the dealership’s current site plan does not yet measure up to this visual standard and will likely ride a rough regulatory road until it does. “You have a lot of work to do,” Cosentino told a trio of Arroway representatives, concluding a board hearing on the site plan in village hall.

Arroway, which last year moved its Chevrolet dealership here from Katonah, now plans to add a line of new Cadillacs to its product offerings. As a result, it’s seeking to expand the existing building, located on North Bedford Road at Preston Way, across from the Target/A&P Fresh shopping center. At the same time, Arroway must put into practice locally a strategy General Motors has developed nationally to reinforce “brand identification” through stringent uniformity in such things as signage and colors.

Mount Kisco architect Vincent Franze stood a table’s width away from Cosentino, who was seated. Holding a rendering of the proposed expansion, the architect tried, as he had at a work session in May, to explain Arroway’s limited local control. “What you see here—fundamentally, the design of it—is a local implementation of a national design,” he said. “All this comes from General Motors.”

Franze moved on, beginning to describe Arroway’s plans for a “green” rooftop, when Cosentino brusquely dismissed the rendering. “It looks like hell,” the chairman thundered. “I don’t see one tree, one shrub.” Both Cosentini and board member Ralph Vigliotti had underscored the importance of a landscaping plan during the work-session discussion.

Franze, flanked by Arroway attorney Charles V. Martabano and Insite Engineering’s Scott W. Blakely, was momentarily silent as Cosentino pressed on. “You guys ought to be ashamed of yourselves,” he said. “It doesn’t show anything about a landscape.”

Cosentino concluded his critique with the admonition, “I just hope you come back with something.”

Franze defended the group’s presentation, calling the lack of greenery deliberate. “It wasn’t an oversight,” he said. “It was meant to show changes in the building only—not the landscape scene.”

Martabano added, “This was simply to show the architectural change.”

Among the proposed changes are a 3,000-square-foot addition to accommodate a Cadillac showroom. Arroway owner Lou Roberti plans to add the luxury cars to his Chevrolet line.  Roberti was not present for Tuesday’s hearing. Arroway is also looking to reconfigure the building’s roof, which is now used for uncovered storage.

Franze and Anthony Sturniolo, the board’s vice chairman, carried on an inconclusive discussion of plans, not yet firm, to install solar panels on the building’s new roof. The panels would capture sunlight for conversion to electricity in a photovoltaic system.

Sturniolo, leery of solar-panel aesthetics, pressed Franze for a rendering, saying, “I’d like to see what it would look like.”

With an essentially flat top on the building, Franze assured him, “It will not be visible unless you go up on the roof.”

At one point in the aesthetics discussion, Douglas Hertz, the board’s youngest member, wryly noted, “There are some of us who think solar panels are beautiful.”

Cosentino took a far broader view in describing his vision of the dealership as an anchor point of a resurgent village corridor. “I want this building to look like nothing else in Mount Kisco,” he declared. “This building [always] had the opportunity to “make” Mount Kisco—and it never has.”

The chairman advised Arroway’s representatives to rethink the site plan and suggested starting that process with a trip to the Architectural Review Board.