As construction nears completion on Amazon.com’s first New England fulfillment center in Windsor, so, too, is commercial landlord giant Griffin Land finishing “horizontal development” of its Phoenix Crossing industrial park.
Amazon’s 1.5 million-square-foot warehouse-distribution center, now set to open as early as February, is smack in the middle of 270-acre Phoenix Crossing, straddling Bloomfield and Windsor.
Of the seven lots that comprise Phoenix Crossing, Amazon’s new facility and another building take up two, leaving five available for building, said Griffin senior development vice president Tim Lescalleet. One is a 64-acre parcel zoned to accommodate a building nearly the size of Amazon’s.
Horizontal laying of roads and utilities is typically a precursor to “vertical development” of buildings, houses and other structures in a commercial park or residential subdivision.
At Phoenix Crossing, a new road — Goodwin Drive — was recently “cut” while existing Old Iron Ore Road was enlarged, and both surfaced with a base asphalt layer.
The last installation of curbing and buried electrical, water-sewer, and natural gas lines are underway ahead of this season’s freezes, Lescalleet said.
In all, 8,000 feet to 9,000 feet of new road has been upgraded at Phoenix Crossing, he said. Linking Goodwin Drive to Phoenix Crossing Drive, the site is accessible from the intersection of Day Hill and Prospect Hill roads.
Final topcoating of the road pavement will occur in next year’s second-quarter, with the town of Windsor expected to formally accept the road improvements later in 2015, he said.
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Avon’s E&D Pizza lease
Restaurant startup E&D Pizza Co. is set to open in early December its first pizzeria at 210 W. Main St. (Route 44) in Avon.
Owner/founder Michael Androw said he signed for 900 square feet that previously was home to The New England Pasta Co. DP1 LLC is the landlord; Windsor Management is property manager.
E & D Pizza is in the process of building out the restaurant, where 10 to 15 employees will serve salads and premium pizza, including a traditional, hand-stretched, Neapolitan pie, Androw said.
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Griffin’s Novitex lease
Novitex Enterprise Solutions, the document-outsourcing spinoff from Stamford’s Pitney Bowes Inc., has leased a 137,000-square-foot industrial building in Windsor’s New England Tradeport for its operations, market watchers say.
Griffin Land is owner/landlord for the facility at 758 Rainbow Road. Griffin also owns the 600-acre tradeport, adjacent to Bradley International Airport.
Griffin back in August publicly acknowledged signing the unidentified tenant, which industry sources later identified as Novitex, formerly Pitney Bowes Management Services before the recent spinoff.
However, Novitex declined to publicly confirm that. Griffin Land referred questions about the lease to Novitex.
But realty research organization CoStar Group, in its third-quarter market report about Greater Hartford’s industrial vacancy trends, identified Novitex as the tenant. Sources said Novitex vacated space in another of Griffin’s other tradeport properties to take space at 758 Rainbow.
Pitney Bowes Management Services was acquired by its former parent in 2013.
According to CoStar, others signing for large industrial blocks this year in the Greater Hartford industrial market — including ADS Warehouse Solutions taking 309,000 square feet at 475 Willard Ave. in Newington — flattened Hartford’s third-quarter industrial vacancy to 8.9 percent.
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Greg Seay is the Hartford Business Journal News Editor.
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