John Finguerra recalled his early days in Connecticut in the 1970s when he and his now deceased business partner, Richard Ripps, looked at the vast undeveloped land of Buckland Hills and dreamed of building the state’s first shopping mall east of the Connecticut River.
“We were just two guys who didn’t have much money. But we had a dream and we worked at it,” said Finguerra, now 71 and living in Virginia Beach, Va.
Now, 39 years later and after developing about three quarters of the Buckland Hills retail area of Manchester and South Windsor, Finguerra said there is still more work to be done, more business to bring to what has become the biggest retail area in Connecticut.
Finguerra and Ripps met in the 1970s when they were working for different companies involved in a mall project in Washington.
Finguerra became the site planner for JC Penney Co. and was instrumental in getting the company to build its Manchester warehouse adjacent to I-91 in the early 1980s.
“That’s a two-million-square-foot warehouse — about 40 football fields under one roof,” said Finguerra, a civil engineer with a Yale fellowship in city planning and transportation planning.
Finguerra and Ripps eventually left their jobs (Ripps was in charge of real estate development for the Riklis Family Corp.) in the mid-1980s to work together.
They started buying options on properties in the Buckland area with the goal of stringing them together and building the mall known now as the Shoppes at Buckland Hills.
After assembling the properties and acquiring the government permits, they sold the land to Homart, then a subsidiary of Sears Roebuck & Co., which built and opened the mall in 1990. The mall later was sold to General Growth Properties.
Continuing their vision for the area, the two businessmen bought up other property surrounding the mall and eventually brought in new retailers, many of whom had no presence to date in Connecticut, including Target and Lowe’s home improvement stores.
Other stores the developers brought in included Home Depot, Walmart, Best Buy, Sam’s, Pepe’s, Scott Trade, Lazy Boy, Ethan Allen, Christmas Tree Shops, Bed, Bath & Beyond and Babies R Us.
In 1998, Finguerra and Ripps captured the jewel of development next door to the mall area in South Windsor — about 270 acres of undeveloped land owned by the Catholic Cemeteries Association of North Haven — and developed Evergreen Walk.
“We had a vision for the area. It was a fairly arduous exercise for two guys, trying to put this puzzle together. There was only one way to put the puzzle together but many ways to lose it,” said Finguerra.
“I’ve been working on Buckland Hills since 1972. That’s a long time. And there’s still more to do,” Finguerra said.
