WPI, Holyoke Developer To Construct Next Gateway Park Building
Worcester Polytechnic Institute is moving forward on the next phase of development at Gateway Park with a developer from Holyoke.
WPI has signed a letter of intent with O'Connell Development Group Inc. of Holyoke to construct a four-story, 92,000-square-foot office and laboratory space at the property. WPI, which owns the land at Gateway Park, will lease a portion of the site to O'Connell Development, which will construct and finance the project.
O'Connell Development is currently working on the design, financing and legal agreements for the project. The project is on the city Planning Board's Nov. 17 agenda.
According to the organization's website, O'Connell Development has offices in Franklin, Woburn and New Haven, Conn. Other projects the company has worked on include a 69,500-square-foot building for Bard College in New York, a performing arts center for Northfield Mount Hermon School and Simmons Hall at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.
Jeffery Solomon, executive vice president and CFO at WPI, said in a statement that WPI is "pleased to be moving along this path" and noted that the college remains "committed to the successful build-out of Gateway Park."
This is not the first letter of intent WPI has signed with a developer related to Gateway Park. Last year Danvers-based Kavanagh Advisory Group had a letter of intent to develop the next phase of construction at Gateway Park, but that project never moved forward.
WPI received a $6.6-million grant from the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center in February for the next phase of development at Gateway. Then, in March WPI bought out the Worcester Business Development Corp.'s stake in Gateway Park and took sole ownership of the property.
Gateway Park already has one building on the property, the $50 million, 125,000-square-foot WPI Life Sciences and Bioengineering Center, which opened in 2007. The building is fully occupied and houses the Massachusetts Biomedical Initiative's incubator lab space, as well as RXi Pharmaceuticals, CellThera and BlueSky Biotech.
Upon completion, Gateway Park is expected to be a five-building, 550,000-square-foot development complex.
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