Image courtesy of UniBank

Whittinsville-based UniBank played a big role in launching the redevelopment of the area around Worcester’s Polar Park. Now, it’s getting a branch in a premier location just across from the ballpark’s main gates.

The $2.6 billion-asset mutual bank announced Tuesday it will take a corner retail space in The Revington, a new apartment building developed by Polar Park builder Madison Properties just across the street from the Worcester Red Sox home field.

“It’s the most exciting and dynamic area in Worcester at this time. It’s the focal point for the urban revitalization of Worcester,” UniBank CEO Michael Welch said in an interview.

The branch’s visibility, alone, is hoped to pay dividends for the bank: Welch estimated around 650,000 people will walk by the branch on their way to games each year, complimenting the on-field and other ads UniBank has inside Polar Park, itself. It also reflects the bank’s role in sparking a wave of investor and developer interest in Worcester’s Canal District, the neighborhood surrounding Polar Park just south of the city’s downtown.

“We were invited to be one of the founding partners in what was then the Pawtucket Red Sox,” Welch said. “We helped with the financing of the first building to go outside the ballpark [where the new branch will also be located]. This was just a natural extension.”

New Homes, New Americans

Around 1,000 new homes are slated to come online in and around the Canal District in the next 12 months, too. In addition to The Revington, V10 Development is nearing completion on The Cove, a 173-unit apartment building that overlooks one of Polar Park’s two outfield walls while Boston Capital Development is continuing construction on the first phase of its own redevelopment of the former Table Talk Pies factory and factory outlet site next door. And on the other side of the Canal District’s Kelly Square, redone with a “peanutabout” in recent years to fix the crash-prone intersection, local developer Alan Fletcher’s Worcester Public Market mixed retail-condominium building appears to be thriving.

“When you look at where’s the future of Worcester, this [area] is going to be the identifying landmark,” Welch said.

The area’s dynamism, he added, will give UniBank plenty of opportunities to build relationships with future retail and business customers, he added. The bank has a more suburban-style branch to the north of downtown Worcester and Worcester Polytechnic Institute on Gold Star Boulevard, and its staff will wind up working in tandem with the Canal District branch staff to pound the pavement in the Canal District and in the city as a whole in search of new business.

“What this allows us to do is really move to banking as an away game. The staff will be very mindful about outreach, by going to the businesses, serving people on their home court,” he said. “This propels us further out into the community.”

It’s an approach, he said, the bank has been working on for the last four years and which takes advantage of the growing density in several Worcester neighborhoods. In addition, the bank’s been building bridges with the city’s many communities with philanthropy in the lead-up to its new branch opening, including donations to and volunteering with local nonprofit African Community Education, and landing a junior executive on board of the LABO business group for local Latin American entrepreneurs.

“It speaks to where our mission is,” he said. “We were founded to help serve the immigrants in the 1870s [in the Blackstone Valley]. This is a natural fit for us to serve the immigrants here.”

Slowdown No Deterrent

Despite Welch’s optimism, there’s been a palpable stalling in Worcester’s rapid pace of development in recent months. A noteworthy expansion of a marquee biomanufacturing development next to the UMass Chan Medical School has been put on hold, and many building pads around Polar Park that were planned for more offices, apartments, labs and entertainment venues have stayed silent amid the rapid rise in interest rates.

That doesn’t deter Welch. The new housing coming online “brings momentum in and of itself,” he said.

“Those projects are going to be live and the restaurants and other things are going to come along in the next 24 months. After that we’ll see. As you know, it’s a marathon and it’s not run at a sprinter’s pace,” he said. “There’s still plenty of money on the sidelines that people can invest.”