Dunkin' Donuts Park in Hartford. File photo.

Outgoing Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin got to celebrate a development Friday that won’t even break ground until he’s out of office, but for which his administration may be able to take a good measure of the credit.

Bronin and RMS Cos. CEO Randy Salvatore gathered reporters just before the holiday weekend next to the city’s Dunkin’ Park minor league baseball stadium to announce that Salvatore was preparing to begin construction on the next phase of the latter’s “North Crossing” development – neé “Downtown North” – this winter, CT Insider reported.

That phase had been held up by a lawsuit from a rival developer that Bronin’s administration kicked off the project before the pandemic after what it said at the time were delays and other problems with the ballpark. The developer lost their initial suit in 2019, but that verdict was overturned on appeal last year.

Bronin moved to settle the lawsuit in October to let Salvatore, who the city had picked to finish the 1,000-plus-apartment redevelopment of a sea of surface parking lots, get back to work after finishing a 270-unit apartment building that comprised the project’s first post-ballpark phase in 2022.

“This is the largest and probably the most significant of the parcels that are part of the Downtown North or North Crossing development,” Bronin said Friday. “And they’re also a critical part of the promise that was made to the people of Hartford before I took office, which was to turn these surface parking lots into a new neighborhood that would knit our community back together.”

Bronin decided not to seek another term in this year’s municipal elections, and he’s being replaced by the candidate he endorsed: Hartford Land Bank head Arunan Arulampalam.

The next step in Salvatore’s project, the Hartford Business Journal reported, will be a 237-apartment building and a 500-spot garage, to be followed at a later date by up to 500 more apartments.

Salvatore also has begun an approvals process for another vacant parcel near the ballpark, a former graduate campus of Troy, New York-based Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, that preliminary plans filed with the city show could hold over 1,200 apartments.