CategoriesGeneral News

Worcester is Top 20 Metro Area

Construction cranes dot the Worcester’s skyline, a happy sign of economic resurgence for Central Massachusetts.  More than $2 billion in real estate investments have recently been completed or are underway in Worcester.  New buildings are rising to accommodate growth in healthcare, insurance, higher education, biotechnology and medical research, all major industries in the city.

Brookings Institution recently named Worcester one of the top 20 strongest-performing metropolitan areas, and Forbes magazine identified it as one of the top 10 cities for families. Worcester also made the top ten list of Parenting Magazine’s best places in the country to raise a family in 2014. No wonder Central Massachusetts is seeing more population growth than any other region in the state.

 

Worcester Regional Chamber of Commerce

CategoriesGeneral News

New $11.5M Hampton Inn & Suites Hotel Project Under Way in Worcester

Worcester, MA – A new Hampton Inn & Suites hotel is currently under way in downtown Worcester at Gateway Park. The 100-room hotel, located at 65 Prescott Street, is being developed by XSS Hotels.

The impressive five-story building will be clearly visible when driving through Worcester on I-290. The building’s first floor will house the hotel’s lobby and common rooms and offer covered parking for eight vehicles.

Construction of the new hotel began in February 2015, and PROCON has scheduled a February 2016 completion date.

 

High-Profile.com

CategoriesGeneral News

Worcester Opens Downtown Innovation Center in Former Telegram & Gazette Building

WORCESTER — With words of welcome and the swing of a cut ribbon, Worcester opened its doors to entrepreneurs on Monday with the official ribbon cutting of the Innovation Center of Worcester.

The center is located at 20 Franklin St., in the home of the former Telegram & Gazette. It was a building two years ago many said required a wrecking ball, according to Craig Blais, president and CEO of the center’s founding organization, the Worcester Business Development Corporation.

Overall, the building renovation cost $40 million, including two floors of which is now part of a satellite campus for Quinsigamond Community College. The Innovation Center build-out cost roughly $2 million, including a $1 million federal Department of Commerce Economic Development Administration grant, donations from various foundations.

 

MassLive

CategoriesGeneral News

Winn Development set to buy Worcester’s former Unum building

WORCESTER — Winn Development Inc. has entered into an agreement to buy the former Unum Group office building at 18 Chestnut St.
The company is eying the nearly 300,000-square-foot, six-story historic office building as potential college classroom/academic space and student housing, among other uses, according to Gilbert Winn, chief executive officer of Winn Cos.
He said commercial space will also likely be looked at as part of the overall development, along with market-rate housing.

 

Worcester Telegram

CategoriesGeneral News

Long a College Town, Worcester Now Looks the Part

WORCESTER, Mass. — Although College of the Holy Cross was founded here in 1843, and eight other prominent institutions of higher learning followed, it has taken most of the last two centuries for this sizable New England city to consider itself a college town.

It does now. From one end of the city’s 245-acre central core to the other, Worcester is attending to the 35,000 college students who study and live here, and its primary boulevards are steadily filling up with the civic amenities that attract new residents.

NY Times

CategoriesGeneral News

The Comeback of Worcester’s Downtown

CITIES STRUGGLE when they’re built like doughnuts, with plenty of residents and office workers clustered on the periphery, and hollow space filling the center. This is the problem that CitySquare, Worcester’s half-billion dollar downtown makeover, tries to correct. As it does, Worcester has been remaking its downtown in other, equally significant ways.

CitySquare’s sheer size and ambition tend to overshadow everything else that happens in downtown Worcester. That project does deserve all the attention it gets. When CitySquare broke ground three years ago, it was the largest post-urban-renewal downtown revitalization project in the state’s history. CitySquare will replace a twice-failed mall from the 1970s with 20 acres of new offices, apartments, retail shops, streets, and sidewalks. The development site sits in the center of Worcester’s downtown, and the city’s broader downtown turnaround can’t succeed without new life emerging at the site of the old mall.

 

Boston Globe