🔒Brooklyn rabbi acquires ex-Stanley Black & Decker office building in New Britain

The new owner of a former Stanley Black & Decker office building in New Britain is hoping to leverage leasing profits from his new Connecticut investment to support an all-girls school in Brooklyn, New York.

Levi Raskin, a rabbi for the Bnos Menachem School in the heart of Brooklyn, acquired the former home to some 400 Stanley workers about a year ago and plans to use office-tenant profits to offset tuition costs for the private school’s 600 students between the ages of 2½ and 18, according to a source familiar with the transaction.

Raskin, who declined to be interviewed for this story, purchased the five-story, 135,000-square-foot office building at 480 Myrtle St., for $980,000 from an ownership group that included Stanley and Farmington-based Metro Realty Group. The acquisition is Raskin’s first investment in Connecticut.

The rabbi, a source said, hopes to leverage money from the building to lower tuition costs for underserved families looking to send their daughters to the 20-year-old Bnos Menachem School, which offers Judaic studies and other general curriculum.

Stanley Black & Decker had a presence in the Myrtle Street building since it was erected in 1947, and mainly used it for marketing, customer service and tool packaging. The New Britain-based hand- and power-tools maker vacated the property a few years ago and put it up for sale in early 2018.

The building remains largely empty with only two tenants — real estate firm The Millennium Group and disabilities nonprofit CCARC — occupying a combined 10,000 square feet.

Raskin and Farmington brokerage firm Amodio & Co. Real Estate are currently marketing the remaining space to small and larger potential tenants.

Eric Amodio, managing partner of Amodio & Co., said several large employers with a Greater Hartford presence have toured the building in hopes of leasing up to 20,000 square feet.

A potential carrot for prospective tenants is that the 1-acre Myrtle Street property is just a block away from where a developer plans to build Connecticut’s first-ever, 44-megawatt, $1-billion data center.

Supported by a significant level of fiber optics cables and data infrastructure, Amodio says the building is an ideal landing spot for a tech startup, medical-device company and others in the data industry that need backup office support.

A full-service cafeteria in the basement, two backup generators and about 600 parking spaces surrounding the property yields additional leasing power, he said.

“You have a lot of ability there to have a trendy office with 12- or 14-foot ceiling heights,” he said. “With this established as an office building, we think this could lend auxiliary support to the data center.”

Deal Roundup

The owner of East Granby beverage distributor Coffee Break Co. has sold its single-story headquarters in town to an Illinois competitor for $945,000.

Harvey Glassman, president of Coffee Break Co., sold the 15,460-square-foot industrial building to beverage distributor First Choice Coffee Services in mid-November, land records show.

Coffee Break, which bought the property in 2005, closed its operation about a year ago and First Choice said it took over the building in January.

First Choice currently operates a location on River Street in Windsor. It also has a presence in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York and 25 other states and Washington, D.C.

Joe Cooper is HBJ’s web editor and real estate writer. He pens “The Real Deal” column about Greater Hartford’s commercial real estate industry.