Architect’s rendering of the old version of the new building.
New Haven’s big new downtown biomedical office tower isn’t built yet — but it just got two stories higher.
That’s the plan, anyway, for the 100 College St. building soon to rise as part of the “Downtown Crossing” project filling in the Route 34 mini-highway-to-nowhere.
It will go from a planned 11 floors to a planned … “12” floors … with two new floors added.
The math might sound funny, except to triskaidecaphobics.
That’s because the developer doesn’t want to have a building that ends with an unlucky “13th” floor. So it is redesignating the second floor as floor “one,” and the floor below it as the ground floor.
The $100 million building will serve as the corporate home for Alexion Pharmaceuticals, or whatever the company will be called when it returns to town from Cheshire. (Roche Holding AG, the world’s largest cancer-drug manufacturer, is reportedly seeking to buy the company.)
Alexion has asked the developer, Winstanley Enterprises, to build two extra floors beyond the original 11, and Winstanley said yes, the DeStefano administration announced Wednesday afternoon. It said Winstanley has the right to build the two extra floors under its approved development agreement with the city, so it doesn’t need new approvals. The lab/office building would now include an added 76,464 square feet, for a total of around 500,000 square feet and 13 stories.
Alexion makes Soliris, an expensive drug used to treat rare blood diseases. It hatched in New Haven’s Science Park, then fled to Cheshire when it grew. Its decision to return to New Haven (with the help of $51 million in state aid) was seen as a testament to the vibrancy of New Haven’s growing “eds and meds” economy based on academic and medical growth. The project broke ground in June amid much fanfare.
Mayor John DeStefano said in a release that the expansion “will further position our city as a leader in bioscience industries creating good jobs for our residents.”
The matter came up for discussion at Wednesday night’s City Plan Commission meeting, even though it doesn’t need an approval.
In informing the commissioners of the adding of two floors, City Plan Director Karyn Gilvarg said the extra floors “improve the look of the building, makes it less blocky.”
She said the revised plan will have “absolutely no impact at ground level. Two stories higher, more taxes, more jobs.”
Commissioner Adam Marchand, a Westville alderman, asked, half jokingly, if the new floors will cast larger shadows.
On Mr. Winstanley’s other properties, Gilvarg replied.
Most tall buildings eliminate the number 13 in their numbering system but most people just fail to notice when they're looking at the elevator buttons because there's no actual gap; just a full grid of buttons without the number 13.