State $1M To Unearth Buried Coliseum Detritus

No one brought shovels. At least not yet.

Instead of holding a groundbreaking, officials gathered on the grave of the old New Haven Coliseum Wednesday to announce that the state is sending $1 million here to help the city’s newest biotech developer remove all the old junk buried there since the old arena was demolished.

That will enable the developer, Ancora Partners, to proceed with plans to build New Haven’s next biosciences office and lab tower. Or at least obtain enough money to grab shovels to break ground to get started.

Wednesday’s announcement took place in front of two piles of dirt on the George-State-MLK Blvd-Orange Street lot where the Coliseum was demolished in 2007.

A groundbreaking did take place last year 13 months and change ago. A different developer named Spinnaker has since been hard at work building 200 apartments, 16,000 square feet of retail space, and 25,000 square feet of public open space as part of a $200 million first phase of new mixed-use project called Square 10. (Get it? A new mini-neighborhood bordering Ninth Square.)

Meanwhile, last March Ancora bought another part of the lot for $10.6 million with plans to build the $230 million, 277,435-square-foot, 11-story Class A life sciences and tech tower on another part of that lot. Not much has happened there since.

Before Ancora can build, it has to clean up the soil beneath the ground. Wednesday’s announcement was that the state Department of Economic and Community Development (DECD) has agreed to contribute $999,000 toward that ​“brownfields” clean-up.

That total clean-up will cost around $3 million, Ancora Vice-President Peter Calkins said at Wednesday’s announcement. He said his company will make up the difference.

That doesn’t mean it can then break ground. It still need to obtain financing to start building, he said. And to do that it needs leases to cover at least 50 percent of the space.

Asked if he has any leases in hand yet, he said none have been signed. But his company is in active negotiations with potential occupants.

Calkins credited Helen Rosenberg of the city’s economic development department with playing a key role in obtaining the nearly $1 million brownfield grant. It will help pay for Ancora to perform soil remediation, excavation, and disposal of impacted soils,” according to a gubernatorial release.

This project needed less remediation money than other ​“brownfields” projects Rosenberg has helped make happen elsewhere in town (like on River Street). That’s because the ground doesn’t contain the kind of heavy pollutants found under former factories. Rather, Calkins said, it’s largely ​“debris from the Coliseum that was crushed and put in the ground .. mix with urban fill.”

Calkins is hoping to follow in the footsteps of biosciences developer Carter Winstanley, who renovated 300 George Street complex and is finishing his second College Street tower, partnering with Yale to fill the space with university-hatched bioscience companies looking to develop new life-saving drugs or technologies.

Calkins said Ancora has enjoyed similar higher-ed partnerships in communities like Durham, N.C.

“We’re the newbies” in town, he said. ​“We think there’s value in having more than one Carter in town.”

The $999,000 grant is one of 11 issued during the most recent round allotments from DECD’s Brownfield Remediation and Development Program. The program aims to help communities reclaim vacant properties to transform them into job- and tax-producing new uses.

DECD Deputy Commission Matt Puglisi noted that the grant to Ancora will lever 230 times its amount in construction. That’s ​“worth the investment,” he said.

A crew from Spinnaker-hired A. PappaJohn Construction was noisily at work on the new apartment complex feet from where the officials gathered for the grant announcement.

Gov. Ned Lamont cited the clanging while referencing the rock bands that memorably rattled the rafters at the old Coliseum.

“We’re making a new kind of music,” Lamont said. ​“I hear progress right here.”

When that same clanging will accompany the rising of Ancora’s 11-story biosciences tower? The best-case scenario, according to Calkin: Those leases get signed soon enough, and financing obtained, to break ground ​“later this spring or summer” with occupancy by ​“early 2026.”

The props will be ready.

“We are hopeful that within the next few months, perhaps, we’ll be able to invite you all about for another of these events on an equally beautiful day,” Calkins told the gathering at the announcement, ​“when we’ll have an array of silver shovels.”