Newtown Savings Bank Starting Redevelopment Project

By Andrew Gorosko

Using a towering hydraulic crane, workers last week joined two segments of a prefabricated building in the rear parking lot of Newtown Savings Bank on Main Street. The temporary structure will serve as a banking facility while the bank’s long-planned renovation and expansion project is underway.

The temporary building will go into service soon for most banking transactions. It will include a drive-up teller window and a drive-up automatic teller machine.

Last January, the Borough Zoning Commission approved Newtown Savings Bank’s project, which involves the demolition of the building formerly used as the Newtown Congregational Church’s church house and its replacement with a new bank office building in a similar architectural style.

The bank will replace the existing 15,216-square-foot former church house with a new 16,000-square-foot office building. The church house was built in 1956.

The Congregational Church, which sold the church house to the bank in 1996, has been constructing an addition to its church on West Street, to replace the Main Street church house.

The bank received many zoning variances from the Borough Zoning Board of Appeals in the mid- 1990s in connection with its long-term bank redevelopment project.

The bank project also includes the construction of a 4,820-square-foot bank addition. Currently, the 17,770-square-foot bank and adjacent church house contain a total 32,986 square feet of space. When the redevelopment project is complete, possibly by the end of 2005, the site would contain an overall 38,590 square feet of enclosed space, resulting in a net addition of 5,604 square feet of enclosed space on the site.

As part of the project, the bank at 39-41 Main Street will reconfigure the traffic flow on its 4.4-acre property.

The bank has grown considerably during the past decade. The new bank office building will contain office space, training facilities, meeting rooms, and a community room.

Architect Robert Mitchell of Mitchell Architectural Group has said the redevelopment project has been designed to visually fit into the architecture of Main Street. The bank has complied with the design requests of the Borough Historic District. Construction is expected to take 18 months.