🔒Portland seeks to ditch reputation as ‘drive-through’ town with spurt of new development

When Danbury developer Dan Bertram got his first glimpse of the former Elmcrest Hospital campus in Portland, he was struck by the sorry state of the nearly 15-acre property located just off the Arrigoni Bridge over the Connecticut River.

It was 2015 and the former psychiatric hospital had been shuttered for nearly a decade. Bertram heard rumors of it being haunted. And it looked “spooky,” at first glance, he said.

Residential and clinical buildings on the campus were boarded up and graffiti-stained, obscured by vegetation so thick it was hard to explore the grounds.

But Bertram, a second-generation developer, also saw a promising site. He was encouraged by the town’s Plan of Conservation and Development, which made redeveloping Elmcrest a priority.

A decade later, Bertram’s company, Bright Ravens, and a partner, Rochester, New York-based builder DiMarco Group, are putting the finishing touches on the first of three large apartment buildings approved for the site, located at the corner of busy Marlborough and Main streets.

The first tenants of this 99-unit building — part of what’s known as the “Brainerd Place” development, which will have 348 market-rate apartments once fully complete — are scheduled to move in this February.

A Starbucks located in a new, two-unit retail building near Brainerd Place’s northeastern corner is also slated to open this month. Bertram is hoping to recruit an eatery to an empty 1,500-square-foot space next to Starbucks.

Meanwhile, the foundation for a second, 130-unit building is in the ground, with construction underway.

“The hope is for this project to be a catalyst, and not all that happens in Portland for the next 15 years,” Bertram said.

Project overview

Brainerd Place is the grandest project in a spurt of unusually robust economic development activity for this somewhat sleepy suburban town of about 9,400, located along the Connecticut River.

The first 99-unit, three-story building will charge monthly rents that range from $1,650 for a studio apartment to $3,100 for the most expensive two-bedroom unit.

The second, four-story building will host 130 apartments and 10,000 square feet of commercial space.

The third phase, which Bertram hopes to launch in the middle of this year, will include a 119-unit, age-restricted apartment building for tenants 55 and older. It will also include a rooftop restaurant overlooking the Connecticut River and downtown Middletown.

Each building will have a 130-space underground parking garage.

The site will eventually weave in additional commercial development, including a 32,000-square-foot office/retail building, once tenants are identified, Bertram said.

In return for town support, Brainerd Place’s developers have promised to refurbish three large, dilapidated antique houses. One is set to become amenity space and a rental office for the complex. Two more could become leasable office space for Brainerd Place residents.

Growth spurt

The mixed-use project is Portland’s biggest development in recent memory, but there has been other recent significant activity.

International marine defense contractor Birdon USA bought side-by-side marinas, totaling 31 acres, along the Connecticut River in 2022. The company has since outfitted the property to help fulfill a $211 million contract to refurbish 47-foot-long rescue boats for the U.S. Coast Guard.

In early 2024, Canadian hospitality company Pomeroy Lodging paid $2.5 million for a 6.3-acre piece of a Portland brownstone quarry dating to the 1600s. Chris Puchalla, Pomeroy’s executive vice president of real estate, said construction of a $50 million Nordic spa will begin in February.

The company is targeting a late-spring 2026 opening.

That facility will include a 20,000-square-foot main bathhouse, 6,000-square-foot bistro, steam room, cold-plunge pools, saunas, fire pits, saltwater relaxation pools and more. Pomeroy Lodging’s design incorporates the natural beauty of the vertical rock wall that rings the quarry, as well as a waterfall and flooded section of quarry below.

“Portland and Middletown have that Main Street Connecticut Yankee feel — not too big, but growing,” Puchalla said.

The location is also within an hour’s drive of more than a million people, creating a day-trip opportunity, he noted.

Bertram declined to disclose Brainerd Place’s total development costs. He acknowledged a seven-year tax abatement granted by the town requires at least a $30 million investment, but costs will be well above that threshold, he said.

Bertram said his prior Connecticut developments have focused on Fairfield County. Portland is the furthest he’s ventured into central Connecticut, away from the employment center of New York City.

It is, however, within easy commuting distance of Hartford and New Haven. Bertram also said the recent widespread acceptance of remote work has untethered workers from major employment centers like New York and Boston, making a big multifamily development in central Connecticut more feasible.

Growing pains

Middletown-based Liberty Bank helped finance Brainerd Place’s first phase. Manhattan-based HKS Real Estate Advisors recently secured another big piece of financing — a construction loan from New York City real estate lender Kriss Capital — for the second apartment building.

HKS Principal John Harrington said the Portland site has a lot to offer.

It’s set in a small town, but also benefits from the vibrant downtown and presence of Wesleyan University just across the Arrigoni Bridge in Middletown. New Haven and Hartford are within easy driving distance.

Even so, several lenders passed on the project before one was secured, Harrington said.

“Lenders are looking at areas with a lot of comps, with more high-density areas than Portland,” Harrington said. “So, a lot of lenders have a problem wrapping their minds around a development of this size that is multi-phased. Really, it is a whole new community going into a place like this, where there hasn’t been something like this done in decades, if ever.”

Town leaders say the size and scope of the Brainerd Place development wasn’t easy to sell to residents either.

First Selectman Michael Pelton said many residents whose families have lived in Portland for generations balked, raising concerns about traffic, a burden on local schools and a change in the town’s character.

Newer arrivals were generally more supportive, he said.

Pelton, who moved his family to Portland 25 years ago, said the town needs to grow its tax base to support schools and other local services. Together, the Nordic spa and Brainerd Place development could also provide a long-sought boost to Portland’s half-mile downtown commercial strip located between them, he said.

“Portland has been a drive-through town over the years,” Pelton said. “We’ve tried really hard to kind of stop that. I think until these projects have come to fruition, that was kind of a hard sell.”

Portland, like Connecticut in general, has been slow growing over the years. Its population shrank by 1.3% between 2010 and 2020, U.S. Census figures show, but has grown a bit — from 9,384 to 9,422 — since then.

Lou Pear, a volunteer on various municipal boards, said there has been a growing acceptance of the Brainerd Place as the project takes shape. But he and other local leaders say residents will need time to digest its impact before accepting additional developments of that magnitude.

“There are some commercial areas of town that could be housing, but I don’t think the appetite is there for that much growth soon,” Pear said. “So, this is OK and let’s just see how it works. I think the long-range plan is, let’s do this and not rush into something after that.”

Pelton and town leaders also tout recent efforts to improve Portland’s quality of life and development capacity. A $6 million effort is underway to dig a 330-foot-deep municipal well capable of producing up to 2 million gallons of drinkable water per day, providing excess capacity for growth, said Portland Selectman James K. Tripp.

In 2019, town residents endorsed a $385,000 acquisition of a 5.5-acre property along the riverfront, near the historic quarry. The town has since spent a $1.1 million state grant removing large heating oil distribution tanks from the site.

Pelton said the town this year will begin searching for a developer to partner with on building out the site. Town leaders would like to see commercial development that also provides public access to the riverfront, he said.

There have been some preliminary talks with Pomeroy Lodging about possible interest in adding a hotel at the riverfront site.