HOLMDEL, NJ-The world-famous former Bell Labs building here will begin a new life within the next six-to-nine months, Somerset Development president Ralph Zucker tells GlobeSt.com.
On Tuesday night – after seven years of the iconic glass-faced structure standing vacant –Somerset's plan for preserving and repurposing it as a mixed-use town center was unanimously approved by the Holmdel Planning Board.
The town center is to be anchored by 400,000 square feet of medical office and health-related space. Zucker says that Community Healthcare Associates, a real estate and health management firm, will lease one entire tower within the 2-million-square-foot glass-walled Bell Labs building. CHA owns two New Jersey hospitals that had been closed and that it returned to strong performance, “We expect them to do the same thing by us,” Zucker says.
“We are extremely happy to reach this point,” says Zucker, whose company based in Lakewood first put forward its Town Center idea seven years ago, when Alcatel-Lucent emptied the building, having inherited it from Lucent predecessor AT&T. “We close (on purchase of the 472-acre property from Alcatel-Lucent) next month. We will get in there immediately after that to begin work.”
Initially, some repair work needs to be done to improve entryways and roadways on the property, and its 4,900 existing parking spaces, Zucker says.
Then, work can proceed on creation of a retail/office “promenade” through the building's grand atrium. The mid-century modern building designed by Eero Saarenson will be devoted to health-and-wellness-related offices.
The overall plan for the Bell Labs site includes subdivision of the rolling fields around the structure into five parcels, and construction of 225 residential units. Zucker tells GlobSt.com that Toll Brothers has contracted to do the residential building. The township has not yet approved final plans for the housing.
Lucent had marketed the property since 2006, when it originally signed a contract with a Pennsylvania developer who proposed to demolish the building, saying it was functionally obsolete. That sparked an international campaign to save it, joined by Bell labs alumni, architects and historians from every corner of the globe – and several design summits aimed at coming up with a re-use plan.
Somerset Development first became interested in the property off Crawfords Corner Road in 2007 and produced its Town Center concept in 2010, staging an “open house” at the building – once guarded night and day to protect the secrecy of the research work that went on there – to engage local residents in its re-imagining.
The plan has changed, but not substantially, in the intervening years. Planning officials said at their Tuesday evening meeting that they were pleased with the way Somerset has worked with them to manage traffic issues as the project is developed.
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