The area south of Hartford's Bushnell Park is shown, with the park at the bottom of the image. The Bushnell Performing Arts Center is the large building with the green roof. Image courtesy of Google Maps
A new parking garage for state office workers near The Bushnell Center for the Performing Arts in Hartford is nearing completion and could be the first piece of a puzzle giving rise to a neighborhood that has been envisioned for the area for decades.
The 1,007-space garage is more than double the capacity of the one that it is replacing at the corner of Washington and Buckingham streets, and will help free up vast swaths of paved parking lots nearby for mixed-use redevelopment. The garage, expected to open this spring, also has about 4,000 square feet of retail space that has yet to be leased.
The $39 million garage, which will not be generally open to the public, is part of the $205 million, state taxpayer-funded renovation of the 87-year-old State Office Building on nearby Capitol Avenue across from The Bushnell. The renovation of the State Office Building – an imposing edifice of Indiana limestone – has been underway for more than a year. The top-to-bottom makeover is expected to be completed by the end of this year and more than 1,000 workers relocated by mid-January 2020.
State officials said during a tour of the building last week that the renovation hinges on transforming office space from what was designed for the 1930s to one that suits the 21st century.
Planners see the big-ticket investment by the state as the long-sought catalyst for redeveloping the vast expanse of parking lots around The Bushnell into housing, business and storefront space, morphing a wasteland of parking into a neighborhood that extends downtown south from Bushnell Park.
The Capital Region Development Authority expects to seek redevelopment proposals for state-owned parking lots in the area early this year. Construction of a second parking garage of up to 500 spaces on the site of the former, state laboratory on Clinton Street also in expected to get underway by the end of the year.
This second parking garage – also headed up by CRDA – is seen as the first step in creating “district parking” that would be shared by state office workers, future residents of the area and patrons of The Bushnell. The $16 million garage makes it possible to redevelop the parking lots.
Redeveloping the area still faces obstacles because key parking lots are privately owned by partnerships that include West Hartford-based Simon Konover Co. Konover has said it is open to proposals for those lots but, so far, nothing has emerged. Konover and its partners also are trying to sell 55 Elm.
