101 College Construction Start Set For June

Construction should begin in June on a planned new 10-story, 500,000 square-foot bioscience lab and office tower slated to be built atop the former Route 34 Connector downtown.

Winstanley Enterprises Principal Carter Winstanley gave that update Tuesday night during the latest monthly virtual meeting of the Downtown-Wooster Square Community Management Team.

Nearly nine months after Winstanley’s company won its last needed city sign-off for the projected $100 million construction project, the Massachusetts-based developer—whose business already owns a hefty share of downtown and medical district lab and office buildings—said that this latest planned development is still very much in the works.

“I’m excited to be able to come back a year later and say that the project has moved to a much better place, where we have been able to secure multiple tenants to anchor our project.

“We’ve been able to secure our financing over the last year. We’re finalizing our plans and budgets, and all of this will be consistent with the expectations we outlined last year in front of the Board of Alders. It’s been a very busy year since we were last in front of you.”

Winstanley and city economic development Deputy Administrator Robert Ellis (pictured) said that construction on 101 College, previously set to begin last August, will now begin this upcoming June. The building should be complete by the summer of 2023.

While various aspects of 101 College St. have already won approvals from the city’s parking authority, the Board of Alders Community Development Committee, the full Board of Alders, the City Plan Commission, and the city Development Commission, the project’s engineer, Ted DeSantos, said on Tuesday that the development team will in fact need to come before the Board of Zoning Appeals and the City Plan Commission again in May for two more requested approvals.

The variance request will be heard by the BZA on May 11, and is due to the fact that the city has broken out the next stage of its Downtown Crossing project —a years-long endeavor seeking to reconnect downtown, the Hill, and the medical district — into a Phase 3 and a Phase 4.

Phase 3 will see construction work done in preparation for the building of a new bridge connecting Temple Street and Congress Avenue, while Phase 4 will consist of the actual construction of that Temple Street bridge — known as Temple Crossing.

This delayed bridge construction will lead to a temporary condition where the project’s sidewalk is slightly narrower than required by city zoning law.

“Our variance request is because due to the fact that Temple Crossing is not installed now, our sidewalk will be 14 feet wide from property line to the ​‘edge’ of the bridge structure over the service drives,” DeSantos explained in a follow up email. ​“The BD‑3 zone requires 15 feet. The final one foot of the required sidewalk is the future curb that gets installed with Temple Crossing.

“We can’t install that now because there is an expansion joint below and behind the curb (under sidewalk) that will cause water damage to the structure if installed in the wrong location, so it has to wait for Temple Crossing. So in a temporary condition we will have 14 feet until Temple Crossing is installed.”

The development team will be appearing before the City Plan Commission on May 19, meanwhile, for a public hearing related to their request for a special permit for soil stockpiling on ​“Parcel B,” which DeSantos said is the property east of the 101 College St. site. A special permit is required for that stockpile.

DeSantos also said that the developer plans to maintain traffic to and from the Air Rights Garage and the current 100 College St. building over the course of the two-year construction project.

From roughly June through next February, construction crews will close traffic in the south service drive and have two-way traffic on the north service drive. That will allow the developer to build roughly the lower two-thirds of the site, he said.

Then, from February 2022 through September 2023, construction crews will close off the north service drive and move all the traffic to the south service drive, which will be made two-way.

Why do you need the soil stockpile at all? asked Wooster Square resident Steve Hamm (pictured) at Tuesday’s meeting. Isn’t 101 College St. being built entirely on a deck?

“We’re going to make deep excavations for the footings and foundations to support the building over the deck,” DeSantos replied. ​“Some of that soil comes back to the site as fill for the foundation, but net soil, there will be some export from the project when we’re completed. We’ll have a temporary stockpile we’ll be adding to and subtracting from during construction.”

And will this building have biotech labs? Hamm asked Winstanley. ​“What kind of demand are you expecting, especially given the uncertain future of Alexion?”

“We’re seeing a remarkable amount of demand in the life science and biotech sectors,” Winstanley said. ​“Currently, there is not 5,000 square feet of available [lab] space in the city, and yet we have dozens of small life science tenants looking for space and wanting to start their businesses in the city.”

Winstanley said that, a year ago at the start of the Covid pandemic, ​“we were faced with really remarkable uncertainty. And yet we felt strongly that this project made sense. And we also felt strongly that life science is an incredibly important industry, not only for New Haven and the state, but also for the country.”

These are the companies that find and discover the next generations of vaccines, he continued. This type of building allows those companies to start and grow in New Haven.

“We find ourselves in a fortunate place as a city in that we’re bringing online another big block of life science space in close proximity to the hospital and our education centers,” and in a city with an overall high quality of life. ​“We believe the demand will be significant.”