Galbut unveils plans to 440-unit apartment-retail project to West Avenue Corridor residents

Crescent Heights presents 600 Alton Road to West Avenue residents.

The project that developer Russell Galbut wants to build to replace the crumbling South Shore Hospital building will house 440 rental apartments above 60,000-square feet of retail space with a swath of green space facing Fifth Street and underground parking for 1073 cars.

Rendering of proposed rental/retail at South Shore.

Known as 600 Alton Road, the sleek glass and silver project would include two main buildings between Fifth to Eighth streets and Alton Road and West Avenue.

There would be 440 apartment units with an average size of 850 square feet — and they would range from one bedrooms to three bedrooms.

An alley running east-west between Alton and West would divide the two main buildings between Sixth and Seventh streets. At the street level, pedestrians would be able to walk corridors under the main buildings to the various retail shops and restaurants.

At a meeting organized by the West Avenue Corridor Neighborhood Association, Crescent Heights project manager Chaim Elkoby said no more than 30 percent of the retail space would be restaurants, and the restaurants on the West Avenue side of the complex would have to close by midnight.

WAVNA posted YouTube videos and photos from the presentation on its Facebook page.

He said he is trying to be sensitive to noise concerns on West Avenue and “we will have residents on our own site to worry about.”

All the parking would be “below grade,” and that means underground. So the city project to renovate Alton Road and add pumping stations for drainage in the Alton-West Corridor is pretty important to the plan.

Elkoby said that if the project moves forward as planned, it will go before the Miami Beach Planning Board, the Design Review Board and then the construction document phase would take four to six months. Based on that scenario, the target is to begin construction in November 2013, and construction would take 24 months “from groundbreaking to opening.”

About 60 residents attended the presentation at the Miami Beach Golf Course. Several had questions about the traffic impact from the project, and were told there could be another meeting with the traffic engineer “in a couple of weeks.”