The city of Bridgeport selected a pair of developers, including one led by a former University of Connecticut basketball star, to develop a retail plaza at the former Carpenter Technology Corp. industrial site in the shadow of Interstate 95.
The Simon Konover Co. of West Hartford and The George Group L.L.C. of Orange, N.J. will build the 150,000-square-foot Seaview Plaza on 16 acres of land at Seaview and Stratford avenues, along Yellow Mill Channel.
The George Group is owned by Tate George, who was selected in the first round of the 1990 NBA draft after graduating from UConn. A native of Newark, N.J., George is helping spearhead a redevelopment of that city”™s West Ward, even while maintaining ties to Connecticut through UConn and organizations such as the New Haven-based Hole in the Wall Gang Camps.
Seaview Plaza is to be anchored by a grocery store and is to include space for a pharmacy, a restaurant, a gas station and convenience store, and other retail storefronts and offices. Also planned are a waterfront park and a community center.
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The project is expected to result in hundreds of new jobs.
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“This is a great day for Bridgeport and the East End,” said Mayor Bill Finch, in prepared remarks. “This project will restore both first-class retail and waterfront access to a neighborhood that has been deprived of both for many years.”
The Bridgeport Port Authority plans to negotiate a land-development agreement with the developers in the coming months, with officials hoping to complete the permitting process by next summer and open the plaza by the summer of 2011.
The property is a short distance from land that has been cleared for Bridgeport”™s ballyhooed Steel Point development, a planned residential and commercial project on 50 acres of land along Bridgeport”™s harbor. That project stalled in the collapse of the credit markets in 2008 and 2009, and earlier this month the Miami-based developer RCI Group submitted a revised plan to build the renamed Steelpointe Harbor in four phases.
Officials see Bridgeport as a viable release valve for sky-high residential and commercial rents in Fairfield County at the height of the last economic boom, arguing the city can be made an alternative for businesses and people priced out of other markets.
“I think we have to give some thought on how does Bridgeport fit into the scheme,” said Thomas Santa, CEO of Bridgeport-based Santa Energy Corp. while speaking this month at a Stamford conference sponsored by the Connecticut Business & Industry Association. “It should be an opportunity ”¦ (This) other end of the county could be a very rich place as a store of housing, etc. ”“ a great resource that no one is really thinking about.”
