Day: January 17, 2025

Community Spotlight

Aaron Marcavitch says Enfield would benefit from a balance of different types of new housing.

In a region with plenty of dying, dead, or deteriorating shopping centers, Enfield Square stands out — just Target and a few smaller retailers occupying a largely empty structure where anchors such as Macy’s, JCPenney, and Sears once thrived.

But it’s also a property with an intriguing location, sitting between two very busy thoroughfares in Elm Street and Hazard Avenue, each dotted with retail, restaurants, and plenty of traffic.

And 2024 brought a ray of hope when the mall property — all but the Target — was purchased by Woodsonia Acquisitions, which has proposed a $250 million project that will feature retail and restaurant businesses, hundreds of residential units, and a small hotel.

Woodsonia also worked with the town on an application for a $20 million Connecticut Community Investment Funds program grant. After much back and forth with the state, an amended, $10 million version was recently resubmitted.

“It was narrowed down a little bit,” said Aaron Marcavitch, who has had a busy several months since coming on board as Enfield’s Economic & Community Development director last April. “It’s a $10 million request, basically for the demolition of the building and for the critical infrastructure elements of it — pipes in the ground and some of those types of things. We should hear by March whether or not that will happen. If it goes forward, that process will take six to nine months before you might see demolition.”

He said the town and developer share a vision for the property involving the mixed-use blend of housing, a hotel, and “some upscale strip elements” on the retail side, including an organic grocery store.

“It’s been said for 50 years now that Thompsonville is going to be revitalized, but I feel like some positive movement is happening. We’re actually putting those plans into action.”

“It’s likely that the developers are a little bit more housing-focused, so they’ll get that part done, and the rest will happen as they acquire potential retailers or restaurants or whatever,” Marcavitch went on. “If the project were to go sideways, there may be other ways for us to go with this. It is a really great location for retail.”

The housing element is especially intriguing at a time when most cities and towns in the region need more of it. At the same time, a 140-unit residential development is taking shape on North River Street, near the critically important train stop project taking shape in the Thompsonville neighborhood (more on all of that later).

“I think the balance that Enfield is looking for is in truly affordable housing — really low-income versus workforce housing,” Marcavitch said, citing a term often used in the social-services world: ALICE, which stands for asset-limited, income-constrained, employed. “It basically means that you’re well above the poverty line, but it’s still hard to make ends meet. And I think that’s the area of housing we’ve been hearing about, as well as some of the 55-plus and elderly types of housing.

Enfield Square has been in decline for many years, but a planned mixed-use development there has city officials excited.

“We’re a predominantly single-family type of community, but we’ve got some really interesting projects,” he went on. “I mean, the 140 apartments on the river are being built essentially as one-bedroom majority because they’re looking for the commuting professional with no kids. That’s their target audience. With demographics changing, we kind of have to stay on our toes for what the community is looking for.”

Train Not in Vain

The entire rail-centric project in Thompsonville has certainly made waves — with real ripple effects when it comes to development.

Late in 2023, the Connecticut Department of Transportation attached hard dates to the $45 million project to build the train station. Those dates included the summer of 2024 for the final design to be completed, the winter of 2025 for the construction bid to be awarded, the spring of 2027 for accompanying rail and bridge work to be completed, and the fall of 2027 for completion of the station and platform.

That plan is largely on track (no pun intended), though there’s plenty of bid and permit work to be completed this year, Marcavitch said, and shovels may be in the ground by September.

“If you can encourage somebody to come here, that’s great, but I don’t want you just getting on a train and disappearing every day. At the end of the day, I want you to go to a dog park, I want you to go hike a trail, whatever it is, and stay in Enfield as much as possible.”

Enfield’s station is expected to be more than a metro stop, bringing people to Hartford to work; it will also be a larger hub for Amtrak for more distant destinations, while a planned spur off the Windsor Locks stop will bring people to and from Bradley International Airport. The project has also, as noted earlier, gained the attention of the development community.

The 140-unit project on North River Street is being developed by HGRE Ventures, a partnership between Avon-based Honeycomb Real Estate Partners and GRAVA Properties of West Hartford. HGRE plans a $100 million, two-phase project that would eventually bring more than 300 units to the riverfront section of Thompsonville, near the much larger Bigelow Commons apartment complex.

The HGRE property sits on the former Bigelow Carpet manufacturing plant, and the developers recently secured $4 million from the state brownfields program to remediate the property, Marcavitch said. “That actually used to be the power plant for Bigelow. At one point, they were burning garbage in there. There was oil being used, coal being used, so there’s a lot of stuff on the grounds that needs to be cleaned up.”

He noted that the project will include some publicly accessible waterfront walking space, and HGRE will also seek to acquire an additional parcel at Main and North River streets, currently owned by Eversource, for the project’s second phase.

“The intention from the developer is to be able to use that area where the Eversource property is to build a waterfront restaurant location,” he said. “You get off the train, you can get something to eat, you can go to your apartment, whatever it might be, and that trail then would continue to Main Street, at least. There’s also been a long-term vision to have some sort of a pier that goes out into the river. That’s part of my job — to see if we can find funding for that and find a way to do it.”

Meanwhile, the town has received $1 million in federal funding to be used for streetscaping, from the train station up Main Street. “That’s going to trees, sidewalks, lighting, parking, striping, and making the road a bit more narrow,” Marcavitch explained.

“We’ve also been having some conversations about parking issues,” he went on. “We’ve had conversations with a group that’s being formed, a nonprofit group that would function as a Main Street program. They’re still in development.”

Taken together, Thompsonville definitely has some buzz. “It’s been said for 50 years now that Thompsonville is going to be revitalized, but I feel like some positive movement is happening. We’re actually putting those plans into action.”

Further Down the Track

That action has brought a sense of momentum to town, Marcavitch said, even if not everyone is feeling it yet.

“I feel there is a sense in Enfield that people don’t believe it until they start to see it. And nobody is seeing that shovel in the ground. But there are some people who know it’s happening, and they want to get ahead of it — whether it’s small developers on Main Street wanting to do small projects or big developers doing 140 apartment units.”

That said, other areas of town have seen some progress, too — even in the industrial sector, still reeling from Lego’s departure.

“We’ve had some really good conversations with the logistics industry, and we’re hopeful to see some projects that might be coming out of that relatively soon,” Marcavitch said, adding that one property owner is working with Martin Brower, the primary trucking company for McDonald’s, on an expansion and redesign of the site’s truck-management space, while USA Hauling, which owns the former Lego building, is talking to some high-tech companies.

“I have heard sometimes that Enfield is difficult to work with from a development standpoint. I don’t think that’s true, but we hear that, so I’ve been trying to be much more accessible to be that point of contact for businesses,” he added. “I was on a phone call with a gentleman who’s looking to put a restaurant in: ‘OK, great, tell me what you need. Let me know whenever you run into a snag.’ We’re just trying to be more helpful and more open.”

It’s the same with the few existing mall tenants, he added. “They don’t know what’s going to happen. So we’ve had some good conversations with those tenants. There’s only so much the town can do, but if we can at least be a receptive ear, sometimes that’s helpful.”

Since taking his role last April, Marcavitch has tried to put the same energy into other types of properties, from open spaces to historical sites.

“If you can encourage somebody to come here, that’s great, but I don’t want you just getting on a train and disappearing every day. At the end of the day, I want you to go to a dog park, I want you to go hike a trail, whatever it is, and stay in Enfield as much as possible. So it’s a multi-pronged process to bring up our sites and attractions, bring up our parks, bring up our community amenities, and bring up our businesses, too.”