Rock Row (née The Ridge, née Dirigo Plaza) | Westbrook, ME

“At Rock Row, construction is resuming after a brief financing delay for the world-class medical facility and parking garage featuring New England Cancer Center, Rayus Imaging, the Dempsey Center, with more to be announced soon. We anticipate construction of residential units and more commercial projects at Rock Row to begin in 2024. We continue to celebrate many new small businesses in the city and looking forward to welcoming many more in the works for 2024.”
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Quote from the Westbrook mayor on mainebiz.
 
Seems that there are some new renderings for the office building (100 Rock Row) ....The building has been redesigned and shorted from 6 to 3 stories (2 if you don't count the first floor which is predominantly retail)

The new design is (in my opinion) a horrible and uninspired downgrade. this doesn't scream "innovative mass-timber design"

2 stories of squat, beige offices above a Pottery Barn...and yet Rock Row stills brands themselves as "Maine's Innovation district" :rolleyes:

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For those interested, these renderings and more can be found in the leasing listing at boulos.com. So far as the floor count goes, I chalk it up to soft demand for new office space. I am just glad that their current marketing materials still contain the bits that interest me the most: the cinema and the fancy-ass Italian restaurant.
Incidentally, that VR stuff I linked to last summer showed Pottery Barn and Williams-Sonoma as two planned tenants. I wonder if PB will be closing their Mall location and consolidating here.
 
I'm pretty surprised they're trying to sell offices surrounded by a dead zone of parking lots, instead of trying to start with housing - which there's actually demand for - and making an attempt to turn it into a neighborhood where people might actually want to work.

There's very weak demand for offices everywhere right now, because it's so hard for companies to entice their workers back into cubicles. That's going to be an especially big challenge if the office is in the back of a Market Basket next to the Maine Turnpike, the region's most noxious source of air pollution.
 
cneal said:
I'm pretty surprised they're trying to sell offices surrounded by a dead zone of parking lots, instead of trying to start with housing - which there's actually demand for - and making an attempt to turn it into a neighborhood where people might actually want to work.

There's very weak demand for offices everywhere right now, because it's so hard for companies to entice their workers back into cubicles. That's going to be an especially big challenge if the office is in the back of a Market Basket next to the Maine Turnpike, the region's most noxious source of air pollution.
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I think we're actually starting to see an increase in demand for office space. Most companies have adopted a hybrid schedule and only about 15-20% of the workforce is able to be fully remote. The downtown office vacancy rate is back down to where it was circa 2018. It's also interesting that there's been an outflow from downtown to more suburban locations. Berry Dunn moved out to part of the old UNUM campus and CIEE moved from their flagship location on Commercial St. to a site by the Maine Mall.

Having a mix of office, residential, hotel and retail at Rock Row would make the area a great live/work destination but so far it seems that almost none of that is panning out.
 
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Cosakita18 said:
I think we're actually starting to see an increase in demand for office space. Most companies have adopted a hybrid schedule and only about 15-20% of the workforce is able to be fully remote. The downtown office vacancy rate is back down to where it was circa 2018. It's also interesting that there's been an outflow from downtown to more suburban locations. Berry Dunn moved out to part of the old UNUM campus and CIEE moved from their flagship location on Commercial St. to a site by the Maine Mall.

Having a mix of office, residential, hotel and retail at Rock Row would make the area a great live/work destination but so far it seems that almost none of that is panning out.
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I agree it's slowly recovering compared to 2 years ago, but even a 15-20% rate of remote work - which is likely to be permanent at this point - represents a major shift in how much office space people need. Portland's Class A inventory is about 2 million square feet of office space; 15 percent of that is 300K SF, which is roughly equivalent to 1.5 One City Centers.

The examples you cite are examples of companies shopping for cheaper rents in older suburban office parks, where rents are lower because there's lower demand to work in those more isolated locations. But new construction, as Rock Row is proposing, requires higher rents. Rock Row basically offers the worst of both worlds: downtown rents, but without any of the downtown amenities (at least for the foreseeable future).
 
Since grabbing the Westbrook Planning Board materials is a fleeting thing, I just noticed that Rock Row does have a workshop for some minor changes to their contract zone slated for Tuesday, May 7, and the packet materials are posted now. One of their PDF's is a site plan showing all the subdivided bits and intended road structure. One of the things they want to add is to bring a property they bought on the other side of Larrabee Road - the place with the red roof on the corner of Terminal St. - into the contract zone. They also want to make multi-family housing an approved use rather than conditional.

Also currently posted but not related to Rock Row, there's a workshop on a plan to build a Buddhist temple complex on Cumberland St., out near Sunset Ridge and the Windham line.
 
A very minor nitpick I noticed on their lot plan:
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Larrabee Road is no longer Route 25. Ever since they built Exit 47, 25 turns off of Brighton onto Rand Road and then follows onto the Arterial into Westbrook. Business 25 sticks to Brighton and then follows Main St around the rotary by the mill and then through downtown. Larrabee Road is no longer a state route.
 
I’ve just gotta say it; is anything worth while going to ever come from this development? We have the retail stores and medical building. Okay. How about the promised housing? How about the convention center? How about the office towers? Beer hall? All the things that were going to make this a one of a kind mixed use facility for the state. All the things that create some culture and community. I’m getting sick of seeing Rock Row media spam about how great their tent for arts and crafts was in the middle of the big gravel yard… it’s very disappointing as a Mainer when you expect a community and get tents on the dust.
 
NR2Portland said:
I’ve just gotta say it; is anything worth while going to ever come from this development? We have the retail stores and medical building. Okay. How about the promised housing? How about the convention center? How about the office towers? Beer hall? All the things that were going to make this a one of a kind mixed use facility for the state. All the things that create some culture and community. I’m getting sick of seeing Rock Row media spam about how great their tent for arts and crafts was in the middle of the big gravel yard… it’s very disappointing as a Mainer when you expect a community and get tents on the dust.
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Amen. For the summer it could be easy. All they need to do is Google "German beer garden" and duplicate that. It wouldn't cost much. But at least it would be something. I'm beginning to think the people behind Rock Row are denser than the rock in their quarry.
 
TC_zoid said:
Amen. For the summer it could be easy. All they need to do is Google "German beer garden" and duplicate that. It wouldn't cost much. But at least it would be something. I'm beginning to think the people behind Rock Row are denser than the rock in their quarry.
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I thought they set up a beer garden with a few shipping containers and some snow fence last year?
 
TC_zoid said:
It wasn't done right. I'm talking about a *German beer garden* and so not a hasty and zero thought-out one.
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Oh I know...
lunardinosaur said:
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Pulled this from the Rock Row website, since PPH didn't include a photo. This is a cool idea, but the orientation seems a bit odd. Why not put the seating areas on the quarry side of Quarryside? Maybe it's different in person, I'd like to check it out.
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Jeez. That's horrid. It reminds me of the Fyre Festival, when the organizers presented camping out on dirt and dining on Wonder Bread baloney sandwiches.

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I have to openly wonder if they actually have a vision and plan to stick with it, or if they're in some sort of continuous evolution mode that will never see a full vision all the way through. They lost their financing on the medical campus, then secured more financing and went straight ahead to purchase the Terminal Street property across the street and the Mercy Westbrook building on Park Road, a few miles away. Those don't seem like investments that are cohesive to their original and even adapted vision.
 
Press Herald Update on Rock Row

Opening of medical campus at Westbrook’s Rock Row put off to 2025​

The 200,000-square-foot medical campus, including a five-story building and a two-story building, is almost fully leased, Levy said, and plans are moving forward to complete the $700 million build-out of the 110-acre Rock Row complex by 2030.

Tenants of the medical campus will include New England Cancer Specialists, Saco Bay Physical Therapy, Plastic & Hand Surgical Associates, Rayus Radiology of Spectrum Healthcare Partners and the Dempsey Center.

New England Cancer Specialists, an affiliate of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, plans to consolidate two existing practices in Scarborough within 40,000 square feet at Rock Row. Its offices in Kennebunk and Topsham would remain open....

The next phase of development at Rock Row, expected to start construction a year from now, will include two apartment projects totaling 450 units, 100,000 square feet of restaurant and retail space, a 117-room Element Hotel by Marriott, a movie theater, office space and green space, Levy said.
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I was about to send this article into the forum! Good news about the medical campus. A few notes after reading:
Levy, one of the head developers for Waterstone said demand is so strong for the medical space they may add 200,000 more sq ft in the future… why wouldn’t that have been added to start with?! I thought this medical campus was decreased in size too, doesn’t make much sense.
It’s interesting that he says the 110 acre space is planned to be developed by 2030. Quite ambitious considering it’s taken 3 years to build a medical campus and that’s all that has been happening for 3 years.
“Commercial and Residential development” also is unfortunately false to this point. I can’t believe they haven’t built residential on this site yet, it makes no sense.
The next phase is expected to start 2025, that will atleast take until 2028 with their pace, this next phase is much more than just a medical campus too.
That leaves two years for a transit center, convention center and hotel, more residential, a beer/food hall, developing around the quarry, and other promised features I may be forgetting??
This is the one development where I have constantly found myself being so annoyed and negative and I apologize. When something so amazing was promised, and every time we look something is being delayed or downgraded, it gets frustrating.
Hoping that their ambitious timelines are able to work and there’s some real life on this space instead of cars in a massive parking lot and some tents!
 
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