Architect’s rendering of 100 College Street.
Thirteen years after the city “forced” Alexion from Science Park out to the suburbs, the fast-growing pharmaceutical company returned with shovels and a pledge to take part in a “renaissance” in downtown New Haven.
Alexion Pharmaceuticals, Inc. brought out the shovels Monday morning to a shut-down stretch of the Route 34 Connector, marking the groundbreaking of a new, 11-story building called 100 College Street. The building marks the first phase of Downtown Crossing, the city’s effort to stitch back together neighborhoods torn apart by an urban-renewal-era highway to nowhere.
Alexion will be the anchor tenant inside developer Carter Winstanley’s $100 million building, to be built inside Route 34 between College and York streets. The company hosted the groundbreaking ceremony Monday morning in a white tent amid the just-started construction east of the Air Rights Garage.
The move marks a homecoming of sorts for the company, which was founded in 1992 by Leonard Bell, a Yale Medical School graduate and professor. Bell started the company in a small space at Science Park, moved to Cheshire in 2000, and plans to return in 2015 when 100 College Street is ready. The move comes with the promise of up to $51 million in state aid. (Read more here.)
From the podium Monday, Mayor John DeStefano (pictured) gave a frank analysis of Alexion’s odyssey out of and back to New Haven.
“We did just about everything we could in 2000 to force Alexion out of the city,” he said. “We should never do that again.”
He later elaborated: In 2000, Alexion was born in shared offices inside Science Park, a transformation of the old Winchester Repeating Arms factory into a high-tech incubator for new businesses. DeStefano said at the time, “Science Park wasn’t a good place” to run a business. Alexion complained that the building was too hot, and fire alarms kept going off.
“We made it hard for this little science start-up,” DeStefano said. “Frankly, they got pissed off and left.”
Winstanley recruited Alexion to a building he owned in Cheshire. Alexion left.
DeStefano said in the past decade, New Haven has improved on several fronts. Under President Rick Levin’s leadership, he said, Yale “began to place a greater value on start-ups.” New Haven also became a more attractive place to live and work, DeStefano said. He cited the low apartment vacancy rate and the flood of applications from developers looking to build apartments.
Third, he said, private developers — most prominently, Winstanley — emerged to welcome biotech companies to New Haven. Winstanley started with a former telephone company building on George Street, then expanded to Science Park.
In his quest to build 100 College Street, Winstanley received significant help from Yale: The university committed to leasing 100,000 square feet in the building, enabling the project to come together, noted Yale Vice-President Bruce Alexander (at left in photo with Gov. Dannel P. Malloy). The building was 100 percent leased even before shovels hit the ground, Alexander noted.
Alexion CEO Bell declined to get into much detail on why his company originally left New Haven.
“It was difficult to grow in that area,” he said of Science Park.
In the past decade, Bell (at right in photo with U.S. Sen. Dick Blumenthal) said, “New Haven has improved markedly its ability to get things done.” The “cooperation between Yale and the city had markedly improved,” he added.
Alexander credited aldermanic President Jorge Perez with choosing to focus on a “business-friendly” initiative, a jobs pipeline called New Haven Works, instead of using the legislative process to enforce requirements that would thwart the project.
DeStefano said if New Haven wants to keep luring businesses, government should work to expand service to Tweed-New Haven Airport and rail service to New York.
Bell said the move will enable his company, which currently employs 350 people, to add at least another 200 employees. The move will enable the company to continue its mission of “transforming the lives of people” with ultra-rare, life-threatening diseases, he said.
By returning to New Haven, he said, Alexion will join an “exciting renaissance” in downtown New Haven.
“We’re eager to get here without delay.”