Former college campus for sale
13 acres near Hartford’s Dunkin’ Park said to be largest available site in city
HARTFORD — A former college campus near Hartford’s Dunkin’ Park stadium is up for sale, one of the largest sites for redevelopment that has come on the market in years in the city, and one that could bring further new development near the North Crossing project.
The 13-acre Hartford campus of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute formerly housed a graduate center for working professionals pursuing advanced degrees, according to CBRE, the commercial real estate services firm that announced the sale Wednesday and will represent the college.
The campus, at 275 Windsor St., includes an eight-story classroom building and amphitheater, plus a four-story parking garage and surface parking that encompasses 860 spaces. The property is being marketed for mixed-use development and comes on the market without an asking price. The campus is said to be the largest available site in the city.
Aric Krause, Rensselaer’s Dean of Academic and Administrative Affairs, noted that the New York-based college — often referred to as “RPI” — said the sale of the property comes after changes in its graduate programs.
“We have slowly been transforming our programs to be digitally delivered and the reason that we undertook that was because our employer partners — Raytheon, which is one, and many others — since they are globally located, we need to serve their global employees,” Krause said, in an interview. “It was important for us to move to a less geographic-centric model, so we did,”
The change began in earnest in 2018 and when the pandemic hit, Rensselaer realized it could serve national and international students remotely with its staff at the main campus in Troy, New York.
Krause said Rensselaer decided to put the campus up for sale, but the college intends to maintain a presence in Hartford. The Windsor Street campus is still being used by a “small number” of administrative staff, Krause said. Students have not attended in-person in Hartford since the start of the pandemic, Krause said.
Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin said Wednesday the Rensselaer property would be a logical extension of North Crossing.
“We’re going to be as aggressive as we can in supporting and promoting residential development, and the Rensselaer campus’ size and location makes it a hugely important opportunity,” Bronin
said, in a statement. “I want to acknowledge Rensselaer’s long-standing presence here in Hartford, and we look forward to working with them and with potential buyers.”
The rise of the suburban office park in the 1970s led the city to designate the land where Rensselaer’s graduate center opened in 1972 as a kind of urban office park. Two data processing centers also were built, but did not spark the sought-after economic development that was originally envisioned.
“It never caught fire,” Andrew Walsh, who teaches urban history at Trinity College in Hartford, said. “The theory behind that kind of development was that you could count on that kind of new development triggering additional investment around the property and in the late 1970s that didn’t happen. In fact, the Civic Center drew toward it, in the opposite direction.”
The Civic Center, at the corner of Trumbull and Asylum streets, is now called the XL Center.
At the same time, the construction of I-84 in the late 1960s ripped a swath through the city, separating downtown from the city’s North End.
“And 84 proved a hard barrier to get investors across,” Walsh said.
The swath of barren land surrounding Rensselaer remained largely undeveloped except for a jumble of parking lots until ground was broken for Dunkin’ Park, the city’s minor league ballpark in 2015. In 2022, the first phase of apartments in North Crossing was completed.
The first Rensselaer graduate students earned master’s degrees in engineering and computer science, mechanical engineering and management. Rensselaer partnered with large employers, including the city’s insurers and the former United Technologies Corp, parent of Pratt & Whitney. UTC was acquired by Raytheon Technologies in 2020. Raytheon still remains a Rensselaer partner.
Krause acknowledged that enrollment had declined in recent years, but the transition to digital delivery is rebuilding the graduate program’s student base.
In 2016, Rensselaer turned down an offer to sell the campus to the city of Hartford for the Kinsella Magnet High School of Performing Arts.
CBRE said the property is well-suited for apartment and retail development, with close access to interstate highways and the heart of downtown.
“275 Windsor Street is a Hartford landmark and its longtime history as a former educational campus lends additional viability to the offers,” John Mccormick and Anna Kocsondy, of CBRE’S Hartford office who have the listing, said in a release.