Image courtesy of Newman and BL Cos.

West Hartford could see its now-shuttered UConn campus transformed into a major multifamily, retail and medical/lab complex under plans presented to town officials last week.

The developer, a Delaware LLC called West Hartford 1, bought the 58-acre property at 1700 and 1800 Asylum Ave. for $2.75 million from New York City-based Ideanomics at the end of last year. The company shares an address with West Hartford’s Dominion Realty Group, but the full slate of its owners is unknown thanks to Delaware’s incorporation laws.

According to a preliminary site plan presented to the West Hartford Design Review Committee Thursday, West Harford 1 LLC hopes to replace the campus’ current parking lot on the east side of Asylum Road with a seven-building apartment complex rising rising between four and five stories, with three of the buildings pushed up against Asylum Road to form a town center-like streetwall. The balance of the parcel across the street would be occupied by a single story “organic market” and 3-story retail-residential buildings laid out along a street grid along with a parking structure, a 3-story lab building and a 3-story medical office building. Townhouses would screen these buildings from parts of the neighboring residential streets.

Development on the site is hemmed in by several streams and wetlands, along with four ballfields that currently see heavy use from local residents. The development plan presented last week would see those wetland areas and a surrounding buffer turned into public parks.

The development is far more restrained than the previous proposal for the site: a “fintech village” dreamed up by Ideanomics prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Intended to build on the Hartford area’s financial industry, the proposal instead foundered when Ideanomics’ profits collapsed and a law firm began investigating the company for securities violations on behalf of shareholders.