Owner to Raze Club Casablanca

Humphrey Bogart can start looking for a new place to reminisce about those days in Paris.

A private developer received permission from the Cambridge Planning Board last Tuesday to raze the Casablanca Restaurant to clear the way for new commercial space.

Conceptual Links

The board accepted a proposal by Brattle Square Associates to build a 30,000-square-foot retail-office complex at 12-14 Mifflin Place, the restaurant's current site.

It was unclear whether the restaurant would relocate. The owner could not be reached for comment this week.

Meanwhile, the board postponed a decision on whether to allow construction on another much larger project in the Brattle Street area because of zoning disagreements.

The two projects together represent a conceptual attempt to link the Charles Square Shops with Brattle Square, designers said.

The second proposal, which calls for a 99,000-square-foot retail and office building on the present site of the Cherry, Webb & Touraine clothing store, was shelved because it did not allow for enough parking spaces.

"The board was ready to approve it, but some legal issues had to be cleared up in regard to parking," said Lester W. Barber, director of land use and zoning for Cambridge Community Development. "Overall, the prognosis for the proposal is good for the next meeting [on March 15]."

Phoebe M. Bruck, chairperson of the Harvard Square Advisory Committee which acts as a mandatory intermediary between developers and the city's planning board, said that the city solicitor has to define which zoning laws apply in this situation before the board can make a decision about the amount of parking that the developer must build.

Daniel V. Calano, the project manager for Landvest, the Boston company that hopes to build on the proposed site, said that his firm is proposing to provide half of the 104 necessaryparking spaces. He said that public transportationis easily accessible, and that a fully subsidizedMBTA pass program would be made available toemployees of the building.

"We are going to ask for a reduction of parkingbecause our site cannot accommodate the 104 spaceaboveground parking garage which would have beennecessary," Calano said