After years of planning and one year of construction, a 17,500-square-foot retail plaza just off Route 9 in New Britain is ready to open its doors to customers.
The development, at 450 Hartford Road, includes a 15,000-square-foot multi-tenant building and a freestanding 2,500-square-foot restaurant site where a Starbucks is slated to open within days.
Builder James Basile, of South Glastonbury, partnered with Tartaglia Commercial Properties for the multimillion-dollar development. Basile’s father and the patriarch of Tartaglia construction partnered about two decades ago to build a nearby property hosting a Target store.
At the time, the partners also built a commuter parking lot across Hartford Road. But that nearly 3-acre property saw little use, and so the state of Connecticut, working with New Britain officials, agreed to sell it to the Basile-Tartaglia partnership.
Local officials first signed off on a plan to transform the site into a retail plaza facing the main road. The developers were also required to build a new, smaller commuter lot behind the retail strip.
“We like that our Target and now this property are at the entrance to New Britain,” said Lorraine Tartaglia, a principal of her family’s business. “It was important for us to come back to where we started. We used to drive by and say, that’s our parking lot. I think we have been a great introduction to the city of New Britain.”
The Tartaglia-Basile partnership paid $1.6 million for the Hartford Road property last February. Tartaglia said the plaza cost more than $6 million to develop, a number impacted by unexpectedly swift increases in construction and materials costs.
A Mattress Firm store is slated to open in early February and a new BIRDCODE chicken restaurant shortly thereafter, Tartaglia said. Aspen Dental and an Urgent Vet are also expected to open this spring.
The partners are still seeking a tenant for a 3,100-square-foot storefront at the center of the new building.
