🔒After nearly half-century in Hartford, auto body shop eyes $5M expansion under second-generation ownership

Zane Ruzzi paid many childhood visits to his father’s 3,000-square-foot auto body shop in Hartford, where longtime employees became like uncles.

Growing up in Southington, he spent his high school summers working at Brookfield Auto Body, named after its address at 8 Brookfield St. He started with cleaning cars and sanding scuffed bumpers, then worked his way up to repairing dents and welding.

After graduating high school, he went to work full time at the shop.

Now 30, Ruzzi has owned Brookfield Auto Body & Towing LLC for about five years and is pushing ahead with an expansion expected to cost more than $5 million.

In March, he paid $2.4 million for a 25,000-square-foot, metal-sided warehouse at 295H Murphy Road in Hartford’s industrial South Meadows area. It will serve as the largest outpost for Brookfield Auto Body’s growing footprint, which includes two other Hartford properties and a shop in Bristol.

Ruzzi said he expects to spend at least an additional $3 million rehabbing the 1988-vintage Murphy Road building with new HVAC systems and equipment, including a paint booth up to 70 feet in length. That will allow him to work on large tri-axle and box trucks as well as recreational and other large vehicles.

“Basically, anything that’s going to be on the road, we will be able to accommodate, which is a huge thing because that’s not a thing many shops can do,” Ruzzi said. “That is going to open the door to fixing anything.”

Ruzzi bought the building from A. Faienza & Sons LLC, which purchased it for $2.3 million in 2004, according to city records.

Growth spurt

Ruzzi’s father, Michael, launched Brookfield Auto with his longtime business partner Anthony Rotondo in 1976. Rotondo died in 2020 at 72. Zane Ruzzi bought the business not long after.

His father, Michael, now 79, is still a daily fixture at the shop, chatting up employees and greeting customers. The older Ruzzi jokes he’s avoiding his wife’s growing “honey-do” list.

The younger Ruzzi has rapidly expanded the business. He bought the company’s first towing vehicle, a 1989 Ford flatbed, for about $14,000 three years ago. In-house towing added a lot of convenience to customers, and Brookfield has since upgraded to three newer towing vehicles.

Two years ago, Ruzzi paid $600,000 for a nearly 8,000-square-foot auto body shop at 525 Franklin Ave., in Hartford, and kept operations running there and at the Brookfield Street location.

Last year, Ruzzi paid $300,000 for a 2,857-square-foot auto body repair building in Bristol, opening Brookfield Auto Body of Bristol. He paid an undisclosed additional amount to buy out the company’s prior owner.

Ruzzi said he initially thought the larger Franklin Avenue space would solve his capacity issues, but the business has already “significantly outgrown” the site, he said.

“The initial plan with almost tripling our space on Franklin Avenue is we will be here forever,” Ruzzi said. “But we established a lot of accounts. We’ve grown from eight employees to 25 full-time employees.”

Ruzzi went on the hunt for a larger Hartford space, leading to the Murphy Road purchase. He credits the rising demand for his shop’s services, in part, to expanded work with insurance companies.

Ruzzi expects to open the Murphy Road site during the first half of 2026. He plans to refocus the Franklin Avenue location on mechanical calibration and alignment services, and maybe auto sales. All body work will go to Murphy Road.

Ruzzi also plans to keep the shop at 8 Brookfield St., which could serve, at a minimum, as a spillover lot.

More activity

Brookfield Auto’s Murphy Road expansion is being facilitated by a $3.86 million U.S. Small Business Administration 504 program loan. It allowed Ruzzi to purchase the property with a 10% down payment. The 25-year loan will have an interest rate of 6.8% or less.

KeyBank and Hamden-based economic development lender Community Investment Corp. partnered on the loan.

“He’s a young up-and-comer who has figured out his trade,” Richard D. Evans, a senior vice president and loan officer at Community Investment Corp., said of Ruzzi. “He was fantastic to work with. You have to like a client who, when you ask for something, they get it back to you immediately.”

Evans said his organization is happy to fund redevelopment in an area of Hartford that has experienced an uptick in activity of late.

Ruzzi’s Murphy Road building is just off Interstate 91 and Route 15, near Brainard Airport. It’s an industrial area that has seen a fair amount of activity in recent years, partially thanks to easy highway access, noted Philip Gagnon, a principal at real estate services firm Colliers, who acted as listing broker for 295H Murphy Road.

A year ago, an 18,920-square-foot showroom building at the corner of Murphy and Brainard roads sold for $2.75 million to a company planning to install a flooring shop.

Last November, an entity in charge of dissolving the defunct Materials Innovation and Recycling Authority (MIRA) sold for $12 million two Murphy Road properties, one with a 92,616-square-foot recycling facility and another with a 19,200-square-foot industrial building. The buyer was Enfield-based USA Waste and Recycling, which already has operations established in the South Meadows.

In 2023, Massachusetts-based cannabis company Insa paid $2.5 million for a former Restoration Lighting Gallery building at 167 Brainard Road, where it has opened a retail dispensary. It also paid $4 million for an adjacent property that formerly housed the USS Chowder Pot IV restaurant, where it plans to launch cultivation operations.

“Murphy Road is getting a much stronger look from companies that want easy access to Airport Road,” Gagnon said.