After years of delays related to its ultimately scuttled desire to move to the former UConn Campus in West Hartford, the Children’s Museum says it’s in negotiations to purchase a new home in Hartford.
Museum officials have also quietly begun fundraising for the project, which is expected to cost between $20 million and $25 million.
Museum Executive Director Michael Werle confirmed that the longtime West Hartford educational and cultural institution was negotiating a property purchase with the University of Hartford.
The Hartford Courant first reported the sale talks on Thursday.
It’s been a year since the museum’s Trout Brook Drive lease with the private Kingswood Oxford School expired, but there are other reasons the museum has been trying to find a new home, including space constraints, high energy and maintenance costs, and poor handicap accessibility.
The Hartford land, which is over four acres, is located at the corner of Elizabeth Street and Asylum Avenue, in Hartford’s West End, and contains four buildings in varying states of disrepair, Werle said.
Two would be demolished while two would be rehabilitated.
If the fundraising and land deal go as hoped, Werle said the intent is for construction to start within a year, and for the new facility to open within 18 months. The property would allow for a facility of similar size to the museum’s current home, which is over 30,000 square feet, but with crucial room for future expansion, as well as additional outdoor space for programming.
Between 2015 and 2018, the museum had worked to purchase a portion of the former UConn campus, but faced competition from a Chinese boarding school, and the ultimate buyer, New York-based fintech company Ideanomics.
Losing out on the campus was “a major setback” in the search for a new home, Werle said, and it stopped a planned $25 million capital campaign in its tracks.
“We had to literally start all over again,” Werle said. “We lost probably 24 months.”
Now, the fundraising effort begins anew, though Werle and his team have already been quietly laying the groundwork behind the scenes. He said the museum would seek funding opportunities from the state and federal government, as well as foundations and individual donors.
The museum may have dodged a bullet on the UConn campus, which had more contamination than expected. Remediation work is still underway, and Ideanomics’ latest estimate, disclosed to investors last November, is that it would be complete in the second half of 2020.
Werle said the museum is in a better place financially today than it was at the start of the moving effort five years ago.
In 2015, the board approved a strategic shift in the museum’s focus and business model, which has resulted in new grants and other revenue growth, as well as improvements in its bottom line surplus.
“We have strengthened operations to get us back to a position of strength,” Werle said.
