Coliseum Site Construction Now Underway

Dirt was on the move — and not just in a ceremonial fashion — at a now-bustling construction site that once housed the long-gone Coliseum.

A bright yellow excavator was busy digging up that former parking lot as hard-hatted construction workers ambled atop tarp-covered piles of soil on Tuesday afternoon on the 3.5‑acre block bordered by Orange Street, George Street, State Street, and MLK Boulevard.

That block used to be home to the Coliseum arena, which was demolished in 2007.

After many years of delays that left that site as nothing but a surface parking lot, and after a November celebratory groundbreaking in which city and state officials and representatives from the Norwalk-based developer Spinnaker Real Estate Partners dug in with shovels and moved some dirt, the area is now — at long last — an active construction site.

That means the developer and its contractors have officially begun on work on the $200 million three-part first phase construction of ​“Square 10,” which is the name for a long-awaited constellation of apartments, storefronts, offices, public open space, and biomedical space at that site.

City building permit records show that, on Nov. 1, Alanna Morque of the contractor A Pappa John pulled a permit related to the construction of the initial 200-unit apartment building.

The permit is not for the building in its entirety, but rather for the ​“installation of foundation only work, site clearing, erosion controls, footings, foundations, columns, mass excavations, ground improvements.”

That permit estimates the construction cost for this phase of the work at $1,736,250.

This first phase of the project is also on the agenda for Wednesday’s scheduled meeting of the City Plan Commission.

The developer is asking the commission for a modification of site plan approval for Phase 1A.

In that application, local attorney Carolyn Kone described how the City Plan Commission initially signed off on a site plan in November 2020 for the ​“the construction of a 200-unit multi-use residential and retail building with a 36 car parking garage on Parcel 1A, a private laneway running from South Orange Street to State Street, a public plaza, and a 108 space parking lot to be located on the southwestern side of the Square 10 Site.”

At the time of that approval, she wrote, the Phase I land was to be divided ​“into two subphases.” Now the city and the developer have decided on separating it out into three.

The Phase 1A part will now have the approved 200-unit multi-use building, the western part of a retail laneway, and the public plaza. The eastern portion of the laneway will be on the Phase 1B parcel, along with a 657-space parking garage that will ultimately be wrapped by residential buildings with 120 apartments. And Phase 1C will have a ​“lab/office building” to be developed by a firm called Ancora.