DEMOLITION SPARKS NEW BRITAIN PROJECT
Six-story building where Burritt Bank stood is part of plan to revitalize downtown
Mayor Erin Stewart used a 52,000-pound excavator Wednesday morning to rip into the brick walls of the long-vacant Burritt Bank building, an early step in developer Avner Krohn’s plan to replace it with a six-story apartment complex and retail building.
The estimated $14 million project will be the biggest single change to the downtown skyline in decades.
Krohn, who has become the most prominent business owner in the downtown’s redevelopment, predicted the new complex will help revitalize one of the city’s busiest commercial corners.
The two-story bank headquarters has sat idle at Bank and Main streets in the heart of the city since the Burritt Interfinancial Bancorporation failed in 1992.
“As long as I’ve been alive, really, this building has been unoccupied,” Stewart said at a brief ceremony to begin demolition. The mayor was just 5 when federal banking authorities shut down Burritt,
“It’s been a source of blight in downtown,” Stewart added. “Avner has a vision, a strong vision, for downtown that he’s been committed to since 2005.”
Krohn, a New York developer who started investing in downtown buildings 16 years ago, said the city’s turnaround in recent years has been substantial.
“Online in 2005 I was searching in Connecticut. I had seen the Andrews Building and was quite
impressed. I started looking at the area — courthouse, city hall, the core downtown, and thought this could be a good investment,” he said.
“At that time where the current police station is were a bunch of dilapidated buildings, the Rao Building was boarded up, the streetscapes were just a dream, Ctfastrak wasn’t even talked about yet,” Krohn said. “But I thought with the right renovations, we could attract office tenants — we did. And then we started moving onto other projects.”
Krohn’s Jasko Development
LLC converted the five story, 29,000-square foot Andrews Building into apartments and rehabilitated and sold the historic Raphael Building on West Main. It also renovated and sold the five-story Rao Building downtown and has done numerous commercial projects elsewhere in the city as well as in Torrington, Bloomfield, Enfield and Vernon.
“I look at New Britain as a tapestry — it’s filled with history but it’s also a blank slate downtown,” Krohn said. “Now it’s changing drastically in a way where we can paint a new picture. Its a manageable downtown, it’s walkable, I see live entertainment and restaurants and people living
downtown.”
Krohn plans to construct a first-floor restaurant with extensive patio seating as well as rows of tables streetside. Unlike the Burritt, the new building will be set back from the sidewalks on both Bank and Main streets.
There also will be streetlevel retail space, on the second through sixth floors will be apartments. The opening is planned for early 2023.
“We’ll have all kinds of open storefronts. Almost an entire area of 5,000 square feet will be an outdoor urban oasis — probably a $1 million project as part of this project. Part of that will be restaurant space. We specifically changed the footprint so we have
al fresco dining wrapping around Main and Bank,” Krohn said.
Stewart called the combination of retail and marketrate housing good for New Britain.
“Properties like this and mixed-use development that bring additional, up-to-date housing units downtown is exactly what the demand is now. People want new, they want to be in a downtown setting, they like what downtown New Britain has to offer,” she said. “But they need that excitement, that new development to bring them here.”
Krohn said over the next five years he sees Jasko adding another roughly 200 apartments downtown.