Nearly four years after the only hotel in Connecticut’s biggest city shut down, developers broke ground on a 142-room Marriott Residence Inn as the latest phase of the ambitious Steelpointe Harbor project on Bridgeport’s waterfront. As steelworkers and carpenters worked on part of the 420-unit apartment complex under construction nearby, business leaders gathered on a vacant lot where True North Hotel Group and RCI Group plan to build the six-story hotel over the 15 months. Downtown Bridgeport was home to several once-proud hotels from its industrial heyday, but they’d mostly been abandoned, razed or turned into low-income apartments between the 1950s and 1980s. The only new initiative was a nine-story Holiday Inn that was erected in the 1980s; officials at the time portrayed it as the key to an economic turnarouned for the city. The Residence Inn groundbreaking comes 10 years after the sprawling Steelpointe project kicked off with the opening of a 150,000-square-foot Bass Pro Shops outlet. It has added a Chipotle, Starbucks and T Mobile, and Mobil plans a large gas station with car wash.
For CT city, fresh hope: New 142-room hotel as part of harborfront mega-development
