New London — For weeks, the sounds of muffled explosions and rock-splintering work have reverberated from a busy construction site at the corner of State and Unions streets, shaking nearby City Hall windows and startling passersby. But the cacophony is music to the ears of Felix Reyes, the city’s director of economic development and planning. “I’m so happy,” Reyes said Tuesday as excavators dug deep into a former church property at 66 Union St. in preparation for construction of a 46-unit apartment complex. That project is one of several similar developments either underway or planned for the downtown area that primarily encompasses Bank and State streets. Reyes, at a recent City Council meeting, said there were more than eight major development projects in active construction, most of them related to housing. “There’s trucks, there’s cranes, there’s bulldozers all over,” Reyes said. “The last time we saw this much activity was probably when they were demolishing buildings in the ’40s and ’50s and into the ’60s.” And that housing expansion is extending beyond downtown and into Fort Trumbull, where a 250-unit complex just broke ground — the first of two such projects planned for the peninsula.
New London celebrates a downtown development boom years in the making
