NORWALK, Conn. – There’s a big change about to happen in the city, a Norwalk developer said last week.
Paxton Kinol of Bellpointe Capital, the funder of the Waypointe development now under construction on West Avenue, predicts that people will be living in his striking new building by the end of the year. But that’s not all – hotels, offices and retail are on the way, too.
“The activity and the phone calls that we’ve gotten in the last two months has been incredible,” Kinol told members of the Planning Committee on Thursday. “We have companies calling to build office buildings in downtown Norwalk, two 100,000-square-feet office buildings in downtown Norwalk. We have hotel groups calling to put hotels in downtown Norwalk. We’ve got retailers, literally every day we are responding to letters from people asking about retail. Two movie theaters competing to be in downtown Norwalk.”
The building is only half up at this point, he said, and it’s only Phase One of the project. He said he doesn’t think people could wrap their minds around the size of Waypointe until it started to take physical shape.
He hasn’t seen anything like this since he moved to Norwalk in 1994, he said.
“It’s pretty amazing what has happened in the last two months, as this is going up. People finally – they couldn’t envision it. Now they’re finally saying, ‘Oh I get it,’” he said. “They drive on I-95 and they look from the Yankee Doodle Bridge and they go, what the hell is that? Even people who have worked on the project, designers, come to City Hall, lean out the back, see the parking garage and say what is that? They designed it. … It’s a pleasure to come to work these days because the phone is just ringing.”
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