Waterbury’s blighted sites giving way to new housing, business
Corned beef and cabbage star on the menu instead of schnitzel, and you can get draft Guinness at the bar instead of a German lager.
But the new Tullamore Public House that opened on Waterbury’s Leavenworth Street just in time for St. Patrick’s Day this month taps directly into the legend of Drescher’s Restaurant, a century-old tradition in downtown.
The new restaurant’s debut thrilled city leaders.
“It’s been here for a very long time,” said Waterbury Mayor Paul Pernerewski. “It’s got a classic old-style bar, and just that feel with the woodwork and everything. Now it’s coming back as more of an Irish bar.”
Established in the late 1800s, Drescher’s occupied the building at 21 Leavenworth in various forms until 2021, when the pandemic shuttered many of downtown Waterbury’s restaurants. Now the area is slowly stirring back to life, and the co-owner of Tullamore Public House hopes to help bring business to the entire downtown district.
“I’ve been here for 58 years and this is where my roots are,” said Mike Pronovost, who owns Tullamore’s with Christina Napoli. “It was an unbelievable feeling how many people came out to support me on St. Patrick’s Day, to come by and say hello.”
New shine in Brass City
The Tullamore’s opening downtown is just one hopeful sign in the long-beleaguered Brass City, which saw factories that once employed more than 50,000 people at their peak shut down decades ago. The city of about 114,000 was left with dozens of hulking abandoned factories, acres of poisoned land and the third-poorest population in the state.
Despite ongoing issues with poverty and crime, the city added nearly 5,000 new residents in the decade between the 2010 and 2020 censuses. Home prices and rents are way up, and a new wave of investors from New York are buying land and planning new housing.
Gov. Ned Lamont took notice at an event in Waterbury on March 1 announcing planned changes in state pollution rules to speed reuse of old industrial sites. Connecticut’s long distressed major cities are spearheading an economic revival in the state, he said.
“A lot of our development and growth has happened in great cities like Waterbury, where people want to be — one of our fastest growing cities in the state,” Lamont said. “People love this city, love the history here, and we’re just bringing that history back to life.”
The debris-strewn property that provided a backdrop to the governor’s event, the former Waterbury Button Factory, will be cleared in a matter of months and could eventually be repurposed for housing, said Thomas Hyde, executive director of the Waterbury Development Corporation.
“There’s still inground contaminants that we’ll have to deal with… at that point, there may be an interested developer or we’d be looking at additional state funding to try to clean it up,” Hyde said. A new baseball field was also built last year on a former factory site up the street.
Even Holy Land, the famously long-decaying theme park with a giant cross that looms over the city from Pine Hill, is slated for improvements, thanks to a Waterburyborn priest who was a contractor before taking his vows. Lifetime Waterbury resident Pernerewski, in his first months as mayor, sees a new energy in the city.
“It’s not going to be what it was back in the ’50s and ’60s, but we can bring back the vibrancy and the centrality of the city to what it was back in those days,” Pernerewski said.
New housing coming to downtown
Aiding in downtown Waterbury’s revival will be the 120 new housing units, mostly marketrate apartments, slated to open in the coming year, with dozens more in the earlier planning stages.
“For a long time it was a big push out to the suburbs and everybody was leaving the central cities. Now you’ve got a lot of younger people, they don’t want to drive, they want to be connected,” Pernerewski said. “You get all those things downtown.”
Fueling the demand for housing downtown in part is the growth of UConn Waterbury, the university’s regional campus centered on East Main Street. Waterbury was the only regional UConn campus to show growth in the number of first-time students in 2023, with numbers rising slightly to 243 in fall 2023 from 237 in fall 2019.
The total number of UConn undergraduates in Waterbury still lags its pre-pandemic peak, with 760 students in fall 2023 compared to 806 in fall 2019. Even so, UConn Waterbury showed the smallest post-pandemic enrollment decline of the four regional campuses, down 1%, compared to UConn Hartford (down 2.7%), UConn Stamford (down 2.5%) and UConn Avery Point in Groton (down 3.9%).
New UConn offices are planned for a historic building at 36 North Main St., on the Waterbury Green.
Post University has also pledged to increase its downtown presence, although remote working trends have curtailed plans to relocate 400 staff members to the Howland-Hughes building on Bank Street.
“There’s been some talk about bringing their Baldrige School of Business here,” Pernerewski said. “I’m hoping to have some conversations with them shortly to see if we can do that.”
Metro-North brings new residents
Also powering housing demand is growing ridership on the Waterbury Branch Line of Metro-North, which runs to New York via Bridgeport. Increased service on the line has increased the number of NYC commuters: Passengers can get on the train in Waterbury at 4:45 a.m. and arrive at Grand Central by 7:28 a.m.
The Waterbury Branch Line has the fastest growing ridership in the state, Pernerewski said, “especially post-COVID when people have moved up here to get out of the city. Many of them are only working two days a week, three days a week, so they can live here.”
The growth of the Metro-North route also bodes well for the future of a 20-acre former brass manufacturing complex near the train station, on Freight Street, which has been cleared of dilapidated buildings in recent years and is now awaiting testing prior to redevelopment.
“What we want to do is get a developer on board,” said Hyde, adding that the growth of Metro-North ridership is expected to spark new development throughout Greater Waterbury and into the lower Naugatuck Valley.
The Waterbury line is slated to get stylish new French rail cars in coming years and lawmakers are pushing for more trains and new stations in the Naugatuck Valley.
The Freight Street site would be ideal for “transit-oriented development,” the catchphrase and grant programs used to encourage higher density in the state’s towns and cities and new construction near major transit routes. Access to transit has shaped Waterbury’s priorities, Hyde said.
“It’s all part of the redevelopment of downtown, where people can walk from Freight Street, where they can walk to the train station, have a job in Fairfield County or in New York, come back to Waterbury and live,” Hyde said.
Factory sites move toward reuse
In addition to Freight Street, many of Waterbury’s more than 33 former factory sites are also moving toward reuse in coming years, thanks to a flood of money channeled into the city from President Biden’s Infrastructure Act.
Top priority is the former Anamet hosemaking facility, a 17-acre site at 698 South Main St. with a surviving high-bay warehouse building suitable for a distribution center. The city spent $4.4 million to clean up the site and restore the warehouse, but has yet to make a deal to redevelop the site.
“We’re going to go out to bid again this year,” Hyde said. “Depending on what the end use is, ideally this year or next we’ll start to see something.”
Waterbury is actually running short on industrial space for smaller users, with demand outstripping supply, said Brian Godin of Middlebury’s Godin Property Brokers.
“In general, there’s not a lot of inventory available…which I guess is a good thing,” Godin said.
Office space is also in high demand in the city’s downtown, with law offices and other users seeking to expand and New York investors buying buildings. Godin said he has worked in the Waterbury commercial real estate market for 18 years and has seen a definite uptick in interest in recent years.
“I just feel like a lot of people are coming in and I feel like they’re spending some money downtown, which is opening the door for more opportunities,” Godin said.
Mall and Amazon project hit headwinds
Although hopes are high for many sites in Waterbury, some question marks remain.
Like many malls across the state, Brass Mill Center has lost anchor tenants like Macy’s and Sears as shopping habits shift. Although the mall will get its movie theater back soon, Bath & Body Works announced earlier this month it would move to Waterbury Plaza across town.
A “for lease” notice is currently the largest signage at the mall’s entrance and the adjacent Brass Mill Commons was recently pulled off the market by its current owners.
Waterbury’s two hospitals are also struggling in a climate that has left most of the state’s health care systems reeling from higher costs and reimbursement issues. Owned by ailing Prospect Medical Holdings, Waterbury Hospital got a new leader in February ahead of a planned sale to Yale New Haven Health. That deal has been delayed for two years as the state analyzes its impact and two sides squabble over terms.
Saint Mary’s, acquired by Trinity Health in 2015, reported declines in employee numbers, patient discharges and staffed beds in fiscal 2022 compared to prior years, according to the state Office of Health Strategy.
Uncertainty also looms over a proposed Amazon distribution center that would employ 1,000 at a site that straddles the WaterburyNaugatuck border. The developer asked that the closing deadline be extended until December amid concerns about feasibility in the current market.
But Waterbury leaders are optimistic the deal will go through and a 660,000-square-foot Amazon facility will soon add to the city’s employment base and tax rolls.
“Every indication in conversations we’ve had with them is they’re still very interested in the site,” Pernerewski said.