The cornerstone of Worcester’s hoped-for rebirth is CitySquare, a $563 million redevelopment of a former downtown mall.
Worcester is poised for a long-overdue renaissance with $1.3 billion in development projects, but despite cheerleading from City Hall there’s skepticism about whether the Bay State’s second-largest city can pull it off.
“Forgive my cynicism, but I’ve been a public official since 1980 and I’ve seen too many promises broken and dreams shattered,” said Worcester City Councilor at Large Konstantina B. Lukes. “It’s easy to be discouraged when you keep hearing about the latest thing to fix Worcester only to see it stall. The public relations effort to boost downtown, and a walking tour of Main Street – with its empty buildings – clash, and that’s not lost on many of us.”
The office occupancy rate in downtown Worcester was 89.4 percent through August compared to 88.7 percent last year, according to a survey by the Worcester Regional Research Bureau. However, the report said that with nearly 500,000 square feet of space available, the vacancies could support 2,500 additional workers in the downtown.
Left behind in the housing and construction boom of the 1980s, Worcester has always been “on the verge” of revitalization. In the past, the City of Seven Hills has pinned its revival on a variety of Titanic-style solutions, including a mall in the middle of the downtown, Worcester Airport and the restoration of Union Station, the intermodal hub that offers Amtrak service and commuter rail service to Boston.
But like the doomed ship, the three solutions sank. The mall is shuttered, the city-owned commuter rail station is mostly vacant and, last month, Allegiant Air flew its last commercial flight from the hard-to-reach regional airport.
Trigger Points
Momentum for a fresh start began to take shape in 2001, after Timothy P. Murray was elected mayor. Within three years, City Manager Thomas R. Hoover resigned after eight city councilors and the mayor told the manager that the city needed new leadership. Michael V. O’Brien, the city’s Parks and Recreation Department commissioner, was tapped as the new manager in the spring of 2004. O’Brien had development a reputation for strong leadership skills during his time at City Hall, city councilors said.
That summer, Murray called on the Worcester Common Outlets’ owner to explore alternative uses for the site and threatened to take the property by eminent domain if a reuse plan was not devised. Berkeley Investments, a Boston-based real estate development firm, stepped in and purchased the failed retail center and two office towers for $30 million from Hartford-based Cigna Corp.
The cornerstone of the city’s rebirth is CitySquare, a $563 million redevelopment of the former mall on 21 acres in the heart of the downtown. Berkeley has proposed a mixed-use project that will include over 2 million square feet of medical/clinical, office, residential, retail and entertainment uses.
An eyesore and a drain on city resources as an underused property for years, the mall and a portion of the parking garage will be razed and replaced by a medical office building, multifamily apartments, loft-style condominiums, a senior housing development and retail spaces to accommodate restaurants, outdoor cafes, a multiplex movie theater and a health club.
CitySquare will be supported by new streets designed to reconnect downtown with Washington Square, Union Station, and Front and Shrewsbury streets. A 1,025-space underground parking garage also is planned. The three-phase development is expected to take up to eight years to complete.
While the project has received all of its regulatory approvals, demolition and construction are not expected to commence until next spring, leading some skeptics to question whether the project will proceed.
Young K. Park, Berkeley’s president, said he is negotiating with potential tenants to fill the 250,000-square-foot medical office building. Securing occupancy will trigger the first phase of the project, he said.
“If one of the [lease] deals goes forward, we would start by demolishing the mall and constructing two buildings,” Park said. “Everything is tied together. The challenge is the gap between the construction costs and the economics of the lease transactions.”
Still, even Murray, who is credited with the idea of replacing the outlet mall with a new neighborhood, said he will feel better when bulldozers arrive at the site.
“It’s not real until the first wrecking ball hits,” said Murray, who is a candidate for lieutenant governor on the Democratic ticket with Deval Patrick. “I still feel confident that CitySquare will happen. In the worst-case scenario, the city still has lots of tools including eminent domain. The vision of reconnecting the downtown has already stimulated investment in and around the area.”
The Mayo Group has purchased about $24 million in commercial real estate, including apartment buildings, in the downtown area. The Boston-based firm is upgrading them in hopes of attracting renters who are priced out of Boston’s Back Bay or the South End.
“Worcester has been overlooked for a long time, but it has good bones,” said Taran T. Grigsby, Mayo’s general counsel. “Does Worcester have druggies, homeless people and are the schools bad? Yes, but what major city doesn’t have those problems? Boston has the same challenges, but it doesn’t stop people from living or shopping downtown.”
Officials are taking the steps to deal with the problems, Grigsby said, including adding police on horseback in the downtown. If the city is willing to put resources into making the downtown a safe, vibrant 18-hour-a-day neighborhood, developers will be willing to invest capital in the city, he said.
In the past, Grigsby said, Worcester had put all its eggs in one basket. “Once they thought the mall would fix everything, and then the mall failed and they were stuck. But if you get a confluence of possibilities pointing in the right direction you can do something. If CitySquare pulls out, there are enough forces pushing this along.”
The Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences was among the first to invest in the downtown in 1999 when it expanded its new campus to Foster Street. Last year, the school invested $45 million in an adjacent building.
Gateway Park, a $14 million redevelopment of a former brownfield just north of the downtown is under way. The project is a public-private partnership between Worcester Polytechnic Institute and the Worcester Business Development Corp. At build-out, the development will feature up to 1 million square feet of mixed-use space. Gateway Park’s first building, the WPI Life Sciences and Bioengineering Center, is under construction, with completion scheduled for spring 2007.
However, Lukes is concerned that of the three-dozen projects in the planning stages, only 11 are fully financed privately while another 16, including the $180 million Regional Justice Center, are all taxpayer funded. Another three projects include less than 50 percent private money, such as the Visitor Center in the Blackstone Canal project.
“It raises some concerns about whether a strictly privately funded project can find success in downtown Worcester,” Lukes said. “And isn’t that the real measure of success – when developers want to invest their own money?”
While Lukes said she would love nothing better than to see the transformation of downtown Worcester with CitySquare, she said there is no guarantee that Park will complete the three-phase project. The first phase is publicly funded, she said, but the other phases are voluntary. “Our so-called vision may never come to reality,” she said. “There is no requirement to comply.”
George Photakis, the 85-year-old owner of the Owl Shop, a cigar store on Main Street, said he too has doubts.
“All I can do is hope and pray that these guys come in and spend money, but I have reservations because there’s been a history of failure,” Photakis said. “The idea of reconnecting the streets that were taken by urban renewal to build the mall is great. I just wonder if they will ever really do it.”
O’Brien said he understands there will be skeptics, but insists that the new revitalization will be different. More than $89 million of federal, state and city money has been earmarked for infrastructure and other improvement to make CitySquare happen.
“I’m convinced it will be a reality this time because we have engaged leadership that is focused on the end game versus the previous incremental, life-in-a-vacuum decision-making,” he said.
