It's All Up From Here
November 30, 2002
By TOM PULEO, Courant Staff Writer

Hartford's new convention center project can seem like a mirage even to those most involved, like Bob Saint.

As project manager for developer Waterford Group LLC, he has spent the past two years slogging through dry design documents, maze-like utility maps and enough Connecticut Valley mud to swallow a monster truck exhibition.

But that's all starting to change: Pile-driving crews just last week finished the foundation work - sinking the last of 3,000 steel-reinforced concrete columns deep into the riverbank - and the building's first two stories now can be seen sprouting from the ground alongside I-91 downtown.

"It's liftoff," Saint said after a recent tour of the 27-acre site. "You work hard through the long phases of design and utility relocation and preparing the site - things that in the end you don't see. Then you suddenly come out of the ground. I think the public now realizes this project is real."

Getting there hasn't been easy - starting with groundbreaking in June 2001 and the subsequent $25 million underground phase that entailed relocating miles of utilities.

The most recent challenge has involved foundation work and complications arising from erecting a 550,000-square-foot behemoth of a building atop soft riverbed soil mixed with corrosive ash residue and other remnants from decades of past industrial uses at the site.

The 3,000 piles were constructed off site of steel-reinforced concrete and trucked to Hartford. The hardened concrete is impervious to the corrosive ash that would eat away at exposed steel.

Diesel-powered hammers generating 6 tons of force slammed the 16-inch-square piles 35 to 60 feet into the ground, depending on the location of a 3- to 5-foot layer of hard earth or "till" resting on even harder bedrock. The piles penetrated the till but not the bedrock.

"Basically, you bang those things down until they hit something hard," said Mark Gladden, project director for construction manager Hunt/Gilbane.

Gladden compared the 3,000 piles to heavy-duty underground stilts that will support a squat convention center rising 10 stories from Columbus Boulevard and extending three football fields long. The steel-and-brick structure will top off at 100 feet above the highway.

The convention center's landscaped esplanade - which will run along the highway side of the building - will sit about 30 feet above the interstate, or roughly the same height as Riverfront Plaza's highway-spanning pedestrian platform.

To date, the convention center is most visible at the southern end of the site, where crews are using pre-cast concrete to erect the first three levels of what will be an eight-story parking garage.

The first two levels of the actual convention center also entail parking - semi-enclosed decks softened by brick piers and horizontal concrete bands shielding the parked automobiles from public view. Similar bands surround the new Morgan Street Garage that has won praise for its look.

"You don't see the cars - they're there, but you're looking at the bands of concrete," said Anthony J. Amenta of Amenta/Emma Architects in Hartford, which designed Morgan Street and is in charge of parking design at the convention center. "It's a visual screen. You're really focused on the façade as opposed to what's inside."

Besides the camouflage banding, plans show that the convention center will sit back 80 yards from Columbus Boulevard at the narrowest point and nearly 130 yards at the widest. The buffer will include a 30-yard wide landscaped park and a brick plaza filled with benches and plantings.

"It's going to be a very large building - it's a `Wow!'" Amenta said. "But it's going to be appropriately scaled for the site. I don't think anyone will look at it and not be impressed. People are going to feel good about it."

Crews plan to work through the winter on the convention center's lower floors so the superstructure work can begin in the spring.

At that point, with nearly two years of preparation work out of the way, Hartford residents will know then that the convention center is real.

"That will be fairly dramatic," Saint said. "You'll start to see the full height of the building. The public will really get a sense of the size and shape."