Healthy Investments Partners Transform North End Section Into A Medical Community

Ben Surner says it would be much easier — and probably more cost-effective — to tear down the property at 3640 Main St. in Springfield and build the planned Brightwood Medical Arts & Conference Center from scratch.

 

But that wouldn’t be as much fun (that’s a word he used often) as renovating the century-old manufacturing complex at that address for the same intended use.
Nor would it enable Surner and his partners to carry out other aspects of their mission to create a health care complex on an eight-acre site in the city’s North End on property Surner acquired years ago while securing a new home for his manufacturing company, National Vinyl Products.

Indeed, while creating viable commercial real estate investments and bringing new jobs to Springfield are the primary goals behind a string of projects in the so-called Wason section, Surner and fellow managing partner Mark Benoit want to preserve a piece of Springfield’s fabled industrial past.

They accomplished all of the above with the first two parts of this broad project. These are known as 3500 Main St. and 3550 Main St., respectively. The former, the new home of the Pioneer Valley chapter of the American Red Cross, entailed a dramatic overhaul of a portion of the old Moore Drop Forge complex, while the latter required extensive renovation of the former Wason Trolley manufacturing facility.

Surner and Benoit, president of Atlantic Capital Investors Inc., have more of the same in store for 3640 Main St., a 200,000-square-foot building that was once part of the Van Norman manufacturing complex, and was the most recent home to National Vinyl Products, which currently manufacturers new and replacement windows and once produced screen houses.

That venture is now in Chicopee, in the former Major Wire complex on Coburn Street. The move was one of the necessary steps to putting the last piece of this project, the medical arts and conference center, in place.

Initial demolition work is slated to commence later this spring, and the partners project that the new facility will be ready for occupancy within a year. Pre-leasing work continues, and at least one tenant has already been secured for the $10 million complex, which will include 55,000 square feet of medical office space, a 3,500-square-foot conference center, and a 35,000-square-foot medical records storage area.

Those facilities are being created in response to changes within the health care community, and also to stated needs of medical practices already located in the Wason complex, said Benoit. He told The Healthcare News that he and his partners noticed a migration of sorts involving medical practices, from the Maple Street area to the city’s North End, near both Baystate and Mercy Hospitals and a spate of new health care facilities in the Wason section.

Meanwhile, medical practices, which were once comprised of a few doctors, are now averaging a half dozen or more, necessitating larger office complexes. And new privacy laws have created growing demand for records storage space.

“We wanted to create a facility that addresses those needs,” said Benoit, “while also preserving an important part of Springfield’s past.”

Indeed, as they talked with The Healthcare News in the front portion of 3640 Main St., a one-story section that will be razed to create parking for the new medical center, the two partners said it would probably be easier to bulldoze the whole thing.

“A new building would be much easier to manage … there are many more unknowns when you renovate,” said Surner, “but it wouldn’t allow us to be as creative or preserve some history.”

History in the Re-making

As he displayed ‘before’ and ‘after’ photographs of 3500 Main St., Benoit said it’s easy to see why he and Surner take a good measure of satisfaction from the North End project.

“The transformation is quite dramatic,” he said. “We took some historic buildings with charisma and put them back into the mainstream.”

But it’s also easy to see why some people told Surner he was crazy to take on the first two projects. “These buildings have charisma, but they also have plenty of challenges, he said. “You don’t save any money when you renovate buildings like this, but you do get a lot of headaches.”

The headaches, and this success story, actually began in Belchertown. That’s where Surner had grown National Vinyl Products to the point where, in 1994, he needed more space and a larger labor pool. He found both in the industrial area framed by Main Street and Wason Avenue, which had the infrastructure — in the form of unused or underutilized manufacturing space — and the location, near the border of the region’s two largest metropolitan areas, Springfield and Chicopee.
Surner acquired two properties, one currently known as 3500 Main St., into which he placed his screen house manufacturing operation, and the other, the old Wason Trolley Building, which became home to the window division.

In 1997, the Red Cross, then located on Chestnut Street, commenced a search for a new home. Surner was approached with a proposal to buy the 3500 Main St., property, demolish it, and use it for parking for a facility to be built on a vacant parcel closer to Main Street.

“I thought about it, and said, essentially, that instead of knocking down the building and putting up a new one, we should renovate the existing building and use the empty lot for parking,” he explained. “So we did a joint venture.”

The group of partners formed 3500 Main St. LLP, and commenced with a stunning turnaround of the property, which now also houses Vascular Services of Western Mass. and the MRI Center.

Joining Surner in the partnership was Benoit, a long-time investment banker and vice president of real estate investments for both MassMutual and Connecticut General, now Cigna. He left the latter in 1998 to form Atlantic Capital Investors, a real estate development, management, and investment banking company. Atlantic has created partnerships for a number of developments in the region, including the North End projects and 84 Willmansett Street, a 12,000-square-foot medical office building in South Hadley. The company also owns and manages several other properties in Western Mass., including office facilities in West Springfield and Palmer, while also providing third-party property management and consulting services to a variety of clients.

In 3500 Main St., Benoit, like Surner, saw a chance to become part of a growing medical office community in the North End, while breathing new life into a blighted block and largely underutilized buildings.

The two saw the same things in the Wason Trolley building next door. As a result, Surner moved to acquire the 3640 Main St. property, then the home to a tire-recapping plant and several smaller ventures, and move his National Vinyl operations there in preparation for a second renovation project.

While the trolley building — called that because trolley cars were assembled there for many years and the building was designed to accommodate the process of building and shipping them by rail — was certainly challenged, said Surner, it was also fundamentally sound and could be converted for medical offices. The 3550 project was done in two phases — renovation of the main trolley building (other parts of that structure were torn down) and adjacent new construction. The attached structures, totalling roughly 55,000 square feet, house several medical practices and health care related businesses. The list includes Baystate Reference Laboratories, Novacare Rehabilitation and Physical Therapy, Planned Parenthood, the Hand Center of Western Mass., and Valley Medical Associates.
While some of those businesses have relocated from other sites in Western Mass., others are new businesses, said Benoit, noting that there are more than 230 people working at the three buildings in the Wason complex.

This success prompted the two partners to start thinking about 3640 Main St.

There was still considerable demand for more medical office space, said Benoit, and the building, while it had its own set of challenges, could be retrofitted for that purpose. Before the transformation process could begin, however, a new home would have to be found for National Vinyl Siding.

That assignment took roughly two years, said Surner — a year to find a suitable site (the Major Wire plant) and a another year to get it ready. The move was completed last December, and work is now set to commence on demolition.

As they roughed out designs for 3640 Main St. (a lengthy process that took roughly a year itself), Surner and Benoit said they listened to both prospective tenants and occupants of offices in 3500 and 3550 Main St. to adequately gauge their needs.

This due diligence has resulted in plans for everything from a food service operation — “people working in the medical community have identified a clear need for a restaurant in that area — to a video conferencing center to a covered parking area. The preliminary blueprints also call for between six and 10 medical practices and the aforementioned medical records area.

“The size and shape of this building allow us to be creative,” said Benoit, as he detailed plans to create glass curtain walls and a coliseum effect by keeping one floor of brick from the exterior walls of the portion of the building to be demolished. “And that’s what we intend to be.”

The assignment, he said, is to preserve the old factory, but renovate it so that it looks like a Class A office facility, not a large manufacturing building.

Building Enthusiasm

Benoit told The Healthcare News that the Wason Trolley building is not on any historic registers.

But it has historical significance nonetheless. It was part of Springfield’s golden era of manufacturing when thousands were employed at companies located between the Connecticut River and Main Street.

“It’s part of Springfield’s past,” said Surner, noting that more than a few patients of doctors with offices in 3500 and 3550 Main St. worked in those buildings decades ago. “Some of them have stopped by to tell us what a great job we did renovating the buildings, and how they’re glad we didn’t knock them down,” he said.

That’s just part of what makes this North End transformation so much fun.