A FRESH PLAN FOR DOWNTOWN BRISTOL
Developer proposes 90 apartments along with ground-floor retail
After sitting idle for more than a decade, the former mall property in downtown Bristol could become hometo a new complex of 90 apartments along with a restaurant and other small businesses, developer Ryan Carrier said.
Carrier Construction Co. is offering to buy nearly 5 acres of vacant land at Bristol Centre Square as the site of the biggest downtown development in decades.
The company is negotiating to pay the city $219,000 for property across North Main Street from city hall and the former courthouse.
Carrier’s plan is to erect marketrate apartments above groundfloor businesses, and he said Friday that it could be completed by the end of 2023 barring unexpected delays.
“The story is really that development is percolating across the city,” Mayor Ellen Zoppo-Sassu said, referring to the ongoing expansion of the Doubletree hotel, the planned 60-unit Kind Care assisted living center the edge of downtown, and builders’ plans to develop two other parcels at Centre Square.
Zoppo-Sassu said the city has worked with developers to research available state and local tax incentives, development grants, tax increment financing possibilities and Opportunity Zone incentives.
The goal is to coordinate an “organized, thoughtful rebuild of downtown,” she said.
Carrier this week sent a letter of intent to buy the Centre Square property. The company would erect three large three-story buildings, two fronting North Main Street and one with a side along North Main. A parking lot on the eastern edge of the property would serve all three, with entrances on North Main and Hope Street.
The plan is to include about 12,000 square feet of retail on the ground floor.
“It would be nice for a cafe, maybe with outdoor seating, and a restaurant and office space,” Carrier said Friday.
Carrier’s company is one of several division of the family-owned By Carrier construction business that has built single-family housing developments in Farmington, Cheshire, Cromwell, Burlington, Plainville and East
Lyme. It recently completed a 32-unit apartment building in Bristol, and leases about 80 units in the city.
“I was born and raised in Bristol, my family has been here for three generations. We already own properties here,” Ryan Carrier said. “We know the leasing market here is very reliable. We have faith in Bristol.”
If the deal goes through, it would be the single component in the longawaited redevelopment of the former Bristol Centre Square mall.
The city paid $5.3 million for the dying mall in 2005, with hopes the state would help pay for a large recreation center and community complex in its place. But that plan fell through almost immediately, and Bristol was left with a 17-acre eyesore of broken concrete, dirt and cracked asphalt after it tore down the mall.
The city went through a series of false starts with potential buyers, including one who envisioned more than 700 apartments and condos in mid-rise towers, 180,000 square feet of restaurants and shops and a 100-room hotel.
The city ultimately decided to break up the parcel, and built Hope Street through the middle to encourage numerous smaller-scale developments with street frontage.
Bristol Hospital put forward the first plan that actually got developed; its $26 million, 60,000-squarefoot outpatient medical center opened two years ago in the southeaster corner of Centre Square. City officials believe that if they can bring in the right mix of offices, apartments, shops, restaurants and other attractions, they can restore the busy street life that Bristol was known for through the 1960s.