The saga of Triangle Park has seemingly come to an end after quite a long time. For those of you that haven’t been following the situation at the triangular lot at 601 Christian St. over the years, here’s a brief rundown:

Historically, this 2,600 sqft property was home to a gas station, though the business shut down quite some time ago. Roughly eight years ago, with the site clear of the remains of the gas station, the owner of the property permitted some neighbors to clean the lot and transform it into a green space called Triangle Park. And lo, it was wonderful, and the City had designs on purchasing the property and preserving it as a park in perpetuity. Then things went off the rails.

In the spring of 2012, the owner put up a fence around the perimeter of the property, unhappy that the City was taking so long to buy the land. Half a year later, we learned that the City was not willing to purchase the property without major ground testing and remediation of any contamination from the years of gas station use. Within a year, the owner tore up the entire park.

By the end of 2015, developers had an agreement in place to buy the property with plans to build a five-story building with 12 units and ground-floor retail, but the project faced serious community opposition. The developers negotiated with the neighbors and Friends of Triangle Park, ultimately revising the project to four-stories and 9 units, but the project still got denied at the ZBA. A few months later, they took another bite at the apple, procuring over the counter permits for a five-story building with 7 apartments and a fresh food market on the first floor, an approach that resulted in an appeal from Friends of Triangle Park.

That’s where we were at when we last updated you on the project, a little over a year ago. But something has clearly changed, as the developers broke ground at the property within the last couple weeks. Check out this hole in the ground:

Reviewing the Friends of Triangle Park Facebook page, we see that the group negotiated a number of changes to the project in order to drop their appeal. Those changes will result in a four-story building with 8 apartments and retail on half of the first floor. In addition, the developers will reserve a small space, a little less than 300 sqft, on the northern end of the parcel, as public green space. We sniffed around the permits for the project, and they seem to square with those negotiated terms.

So there you go. Triangle Park will return in a space that’s 10% its original size, and a new four story building will occupy the rest of the parcel. Though we’re unapologetically pro-development, we would have preferred that the entire site remained as green space, but that ship sailed when the City insisted on costly remediation and the previous owner threw up their hands in frustration. Given that the space was going to get redeveloped though, we would have probably liked that extra story and the larger retail space, so maybe someone from the area can explain why five stories was so problematic and a half floor of retail was preferred over retail covering the entire first floor. Also, if anyone has seen a rendering of the final product, we’d love to see what kind of building we can expect when the construction gets finished.