Winstanley Snags Temple Medical For $21M

Developer Carter Winstanley continued buying up swaths of the downtown business district — plunking down $21 million to purchase the nine-story Temple Medical Center and a portion of the accompanying garage.

The sale took place on Sept. 30.

According to the city land records online database, the Winstanley-controlled holding company Temple Mob LLC paid Temple Street Associates II Limited Partnership $21 million for the Temple Medical Center complex at 40 Temple St., 60 Temple St. (also known as 200 George St.), and a portion of the parking garage at 230 George St. The properties were sold by a partnership led by local builder Lynn Fusco and doctor Alvin Greenberg.

The property is a block away from Winstanley’s 300 George St. biosciences building, another block from the spot where the Massachusetts-based developer recently won approval to build a biosciences tower at 101 College, which itself is across the street from the biosciences tower at 100 College St.

In other words, the emerging biosciences district on which New Haven is pinning future economic dreams is increasingly looking like ​“Winstanleyville.”

”This just speaks to the bullishness of people’s attitudes towards New Haven,” former city development chief and longtime local business booster Matthew Nemerson said about the sale. ​“We want people with very deep pockets and who are not afraid to look down the road” to be putting their money into New Haven. That means keeping Winstanley and other busy developers like Spinnaker Real Estate and Randy Salvatore investing their millions in the Elm City when they could instead be focusing their attention on Brooklyn or Cambridge or Norwalk or Hartford.

Winstanley has consistently won the confidence of key partners at Yale University for his various projects in New Haven, Nemerson said, and he himself appears to have maintained his own confidence in New Haven property values continuing to go up.

“The future of the world is in medical research,” he said. And Winstanley appears to be investing in just that — in New Haven, leveraging the presence of Yale.

A representative from Winstanley Enterprises did not respond to a request for comment by the publication time of this article.

Fusco Corporation President Lynn Fusco declined to comment on the sale when reached by phone Friday morning. ​“That’s rather private information,” she said about the publicly recorded transaction, before hanging up to return to a Zoom call she was on.

“This is a very encouraging development and ensures that Temple Med will remain within the portfolio of buildings focused in innovation and high growth sectors,” city Economic Development Administrator Michael Piscitelli told the Independent by email Friday morning. ​“Temple Med was originally a public-private partnership in the 1970s and Park New Haven will continue to operate the upper level parking facility.”

The change in ownership comes nearly two years after the nine-story medical office building, built in 1978, saw one of its anchor tenants, Yale New Haven Hospital, relocate its outpatient services and radiologist and anesthesiologist practices out of Temple Medical and over to the hospital’s York Street and St. Raphael campuses.

In 2019, Temple Street Associates successfully petitioned the city in court to drop its appraisal of the two medical office buildings at 40 Temple St. and 200 George St. from a combined value of $30,885,600 to a combined value of $23,000,000. The city last appraised the privately-owned portion of the Temple Medical parking garage as worth $1,604,900.

At a February parking authority meeting this year during which parking commissioners granted the then-owners a 20-year extension to their parking permit agreement with the city, Lynn Fusco described as a ​“myth” the notion that the Temple Medical Center was on the brink of insolvency because of the loss of YNHH as a tenant. She told the parking authority commissioners that the Yale School of Medicine and ​“multiple community physician practices and biotech companies’ remained as tenants in the complex.

“As you know,” Fusco wrote in a Dec. 24, 2019 letter to the parking authority, ​“much has been said in the public realm about New Haven’s future with biotech and medical industries. New Haven’s growth is tied very closely to available office and laboratory space in the vicinity of both Yale New Haven Hospital and Yale University. We have and will continue to invest heavy capital in the infrastructure of Temple Medical Center in order to assure the market place of our attractiveness to these types of tenants.”

Vin Petrini, YNHH’s senior vice president for public affairs, confirmed for the Independent that YNHH does not currently lease any space in Temple Med. ​“We’ve worked in partnership with Carter Winstanley for a number of years, and we welcome his ownership of the building,” he added, noting that he had testified this summer at a virtual City Hall hearing in support of Winstanley’s 101 College project nearby.

Winstanley On The March

For Winstanley, the Temple Medical purchase represents just the latest major investment in its decades-long push to build up New Haven’s bioscience market. It also adds to Winstanley’s increasingly comprehensive portfolio of local research, lab and office real estate, much of which it rents to Yale University and Yale New Haven Hospital affiliates.

He began doing that in the 1990s, when he rescued two flailing biotech projects: 300 George St. and 25 Science Park. He renovated them and filled them. He cemented a close working relationship with both Yale and City Hall.

Earlier this year, Winstanley secured city and aldermanic approval to build a new 10-story, 500,000 square-foot bioscience lab and office tower at 101 College St. The developer estimated that that project should cost over $100 million to construct.

Winstanley also built and owns the 14-story, 513,000 square foot laboratory, research and office building across the street at 100 College St., also known as the Alexion Building. Last year, Yale leased approximately half of the building while Alexion maintained its lease of the other half.

Just around the corner, Winstanley also owns the nine-story lab, research and office building at 300 George St.

In Science Park, the company owns the six-story lab, research and office building at 25 Science Park — also known as 150 Munson St.

And the Independent’s review of a 2019 list of major changes to the municipal tax rolls showed that the top five shifts from taxable and tax exempt properties citywide were all at Winstanley-owned buildings.

Those included:

• 150 Munson St., which the city assessor said at the time is occupied by Yale’s IT Services, Finance & Business Administration, Yale Health Plan, Office of Research & Administration, and Yale Shared Services;

• A six-story parking garage at 276 Winchester Ave., occupied in part by Yale-leased parking spaces

• A single-story warehouse at 344 Winchester Ave., occupied by Yale dining, facilities, Yale Press, and library services;

• A three-story office building at 123 College St., home to Yale’s Office of Environmental Health and Safety, Broadcast Media, Yale School of Medicine Cardiology, and Occupational Medicine and Internal Medicine;

• A five-story office building at 2 Church St. South, part of which is occupied by the Yale Department of Psychiatry, Pediatrics & Neurology, the Yale School of Public Health, the Yale Center for Clinical Investigation, the Yale Stress Center, and the Yale Office of Cooperative Research.

During a May presentation to the city Development Commission about the 101 College project in particular and about his company’s larger plans for New Haven’s bioscience sector more broadly, Winstanley Enterprises Principal Carter Winstanley said he sees — and has long seen — the Elm City as on the brink of of having a ​“life science cluster” similar to that which exists in Kendall Square in Cambridge, Mass.

Winstanley said at the time that he believes live science companies have congregated in Kendall Square in part because of the density of intellectual property, relevant talent, physical lab spaces, and opportunities to collaborate with like-minded professionals.

“You need enough massing in a space so that people stop moving when a company fails,” he said during that meeting.

“We’re where Kendall Square was 20 years ago. We’re late. Or, we’re very early on in the cycle of building the massing. That’s why we’re continuing to push to put more buildings up.”