Goodwin College has broken ground on an $8 million commercial building at a Main Street gateway to the riverside campus, part of the college’s ongoing expansion.
The 25,000-square-foot building is to be completed next year, and the first confirmed tenant is American Eagle Federal Credit Union, Goodwin spokesman Philip Moore said Monday. College officials have said the building also is to include one or two restaurants, office space and perhaps a retail shop.
“Set back from the corner of Main and Ensign streets, it will welcome visitors into a re-imagined neighborhood that leads to the Connecticut River, other commercial and residential spaces and the Goodwin College campus,” a news release said.
Since 2009, when the current campus was built on the site of an abandoned oil storage yard, the private, nonprofit college has been buying houses and land between Main Street and Riverside Drive. Goodwin now owns the majority of the neighborhood south of Willow Street and north of a 60-acre wetland that was once a Pratt & Whitney testing site. Other planned building projects include a marina, a riverfront hotel and student housing.
“This project will be a springboard,” Goodwin President Mark Scheinberg said of the mixed use building on Main Street. “The south end of East Hartford is ripe for this type of development.”
The college will pay about $1.3 million in taxes on the building over an eight-year phase-in period, the release said. The town also is to receive about $260,000 in permit fees.
“I’m excited about the possibilities,” Mayor Marcia Leclerc said of Goodwin’s development. “Goodwin College challenges the processes… not just for moving people forward — now they’re moving land mass and development forward in East Hartford.”
Also, a 15,000-square-foot manufacturing education annex — meant to answer the continuing, pressing need for skilled workers in Connecticut — is to be ready for students in January, Moore said. Located next to Goodwin’s Business and Advanced Manufacturing Center on Pent Road, the annex will house equipment that replicates the entire manufacturing process, from conceptual design through quality assurance and logistics. The state is funding $8.4 million of the $10.5 million project, with Goodwin picking up the rest, according to a project description.
Finally, a $4 million project designed to improve campus drainage has started at the Connecticut River outfall at 125 Riverside Drive. Work is to continue down Ensign Street to Main Street over the coming months. Larger diameter trunk lines are to replace narrow pipes draining the campus between Main Street and the Connecticut River. Because those aging pipes are inadequate, the college has had to install water holding “caverns” at great cost, officials have said.
Now serving about 3,400 students, Goodwin College grew from the storefront Data Institute Business School of East Hartford. Scheinberg bought Data Institute for about $30,000 in 1981, when it was located above a pizza shop in Hartford and served just six students. Two years later, he moved the school to East Hartford, and in 1999, the state Board of Governors for Higher Education granted college-level status.
Jesse Leavenworth can be reached at jleavenworth@courant.com
