Surprisingly, the township was ready to demolish the Bell Labs building, Zucker recalls, and it fell to Somerset to educate the officials about the costs of doing so. The key was to turn the project into multiple uses. “We needed to find a way to animate and populate the building,” Zucker says.

The initial plan took advantage of the 400-plus acres on the property, calling for hundreds single-family homes around the core building. They were to feed into a ground-level pedestrian street in the main building, approximately one quarter-mile long, creating a neighborhood as small squares are added. But that proved to be too much development outside the lab for the well-to-do area. “Holmdel prides itself on its bucolic nature,” Zucker recalls. “Any development is overdevelopment.”

Somerset switched tracks, determining that health and wellness would become the main focus of the lab building, occupying some 400,000 square feet. Plans call for an ambulatory care surgi-center, a medical imaging office, and assisted living facilities. “Although there are a lot of different hospitals in the area, this idea is to put it all in a wellness environment,” Zucker says. “Using that as a core us is helping us to attract office users.”

The overall development will have 600,000 square feet of office space (350,000 of that nonmedical), 50,000 square feet of retail space (mostly restaurants), 120,000 square feet of assisted living space, the 30,000-square-foot surgicenter, a 350-seat conference auditorium, 100 loft-style residences geared to singles and empty-nesters on the sixth floor, and 30 homes outside the building and a hotel.

The project, to cost “in the hundreds of millions of dollars” will be privately financed, Zucker says. Elements of the development will be completed over seven to 10 years, he says, with the center section, the pedestrian street to be the first phase.

The building is in “great shape,” Zucker says, and Somerset expects to take two to three months finalize the redevelopment plan and the site plan application.