East Hartford OKs 470-unit Concourse Park, biggest apartment development in 50 years
September 16th, 2022
East Hartford planners on Wednesday gave a key approval to a developer’s plan for a massive apartment complex on the old Showcase Cinemas property, a project that local officials call crucial to East Hartford’s revitalization.
When the plan for Concourse Park first became public last September, it called for 360 apartments on the roughly 26-acre site. But the developers expanded it by nearly a third over the past year, and the site plan approved Wednesday night is for 470 units.
Concourse Park will offer studios along with one-, two- and three-bedroom units, and will include community gardens for tenants, a nearly 1,200-square-foot amenities center, a pool and patio, a fitness center and more than 850 parking spaces in garages, carports and surface lots.
It will be the first major residential development in East Hartford in a half-century, and Mayor Mike Walsh said Thursday that it will be part of a sweeping renaissance of the town’s deteriorated Silver Lane area.
Nearby, National Development later this month will submit site plans for more than 2.5 million square feet of warehouse space on the former Rentschler Field property. Combined with other development it plans on the 300-acre property, the company promises upwards of 2,000 new jobs along with 400 temporary construction jobs.
This summer, East Hartford’s council has drawn closer to authorizing eminent domain as the solution to the long-blighted Silver Lane Plaza strip mall. The plan is to raze the largely vacant buildings and tear up the rutted, cracked parking lot, then seek a private developer to bring in new commercial businesses, retail or another use.
“Taken together, you see a mosaic developing: new people coming to live in the community at Concourse Park, new jobs,” Walsh said.
Avner Krohn and Brian Zelman, partners in the Jasko Zelman 1 LLC development company, have said Concourse Park will be geared to people seeking plentiful amenities, stylish buildings and modern furnishings, all in apartments designed to accommodate lifestyles that involve more work from home.
“This is going to be a premiere live, work and play community,” Zelman told planners this summer. “Lifestyles have really changed — people are spending more time where they live. We’re trying to create a community, almost a village feel.”
Most apartments will include work nooks, and the complex will include more than 2,000 square feet of office space, Zoom rooms and conference space, Krohn has said.
“There’s going to be the ability to work outside your apartment and inside,” Krohn said.
The plans approved Wednesday night include seven residential buildings in a cluster, and an eighth farther away on the property. All are named after aviation figures or companies as homage to East Hartford’s long history as home to Pratt & Whitney.
“The building design, building names, signage, and exterior and interior design and furnishings will provide a unified theme throughout the development,” the company said in its site plan documents. “The principal development site is to be constructed within the previously-developed footprint of the former movie theater site. In addition, there is a 30-unit stand-alone apartment building proposed nearer to Forbes Street.”
Two L-shaped buildings will be four stories tall and have elevators: The Pratt with 164 apartments, and The Whitney with 93. Five three-story walk-up buildings in the cluster will have between 24 and 45 apartments each, and a 2.5-story building — set off well to the east, along Forbes Street — will have another 30.
The town council in October is expected to authorize selling the land to Jasko Zelman 1 LLC for $1. Walsh noted that some critics argue the town should have gotten far more, but Krohn has repeatedly said that projects of this size can’t be done without breaks from the host community. East Hartford is also granting partial tax abatements that phase out over a 27-year span.
Overall, Concourse Park is an $81 million project that will pay about $30 million in taxes over the next 27 years, Walsh noted. If the property remained vacant, it would generate about $3.4 million in taxes over that time.
Despite a number of campaigns to attract developers, Showcase Cinemas had stood vacant and deteriorating since the multiplex shut down in 2006. East Hartford used state grants to buy the land and demolish the old theater.
“The choice was really simple: Leave it as it was and collect $3.4 million over 27 years, or develop it with tax incentives and enjoy $30 million,” Walsh said Thursday. “And remember that the people who live it these apartments will bring $15 million of disposable income to Silver Lane. That’s the secret sauce to begin to attract retail back to the area.”
