SPRINGFIELD — Plans for a $37-million hotel development — complete with indoor rock climbing and skydiving attraction — at the site of the former York Street jail have been dropped.
The proposal is a victim of the devastation that the COVID-19 pandemic has brought to the hotel industry.
Pioneer Valley Hotel Group president Shardool Parmar said he can no longer move forward with plans to develop the site and has cancelled the project. His proposal had included a 130-room hotel with rock climbing and skydiving attractions.
“I’m going to focus on keeping my current properties going,” Parmar said. “Now just isn’t the right time.”
The Springfield Redevelopment Authority will meet Dec. 1 and decide on a plan to once again advertise the site and seek proposals for redevelopment, said Christopher J. Moskal, executive director of the Redevelopment Authority.
Moskal said the Redevelopment Authority had been working with Parmar and adjusting the timeline, hoping that he’d be able to place a down payment on the property so the plan could move forward. But with COVID-19 leaving Parmar’s existing hotels largely unoccupied, the payment never happened.
When the 2.5-acre location at York Street and West Columbus Avenue was advertised the last time in August 2019, there were three proposals: Parmar’s, a different hotel proposal that was long-term stay concept with Hyatt branding and a proposal for housing on the site.
The site of the former York Street Jail. (Don Treeger / The Republican) Patrick Johnson
“There are a number of uses that fit with the Urban Renewal Plan,” Moskal said.
If the economics of hotels don’t work in the pandemic year, maybe the housing will, he said.
In the short term, the Redevelopment Authority is in a month-to-month agreement with contractor Daniel O’Connell’s Sons, Moskal said. The contractor uses the land as a staging area for the ongoing $115 million water infrastructure project along the Connecticut River includes a new wastewater pump station on York Street just north of the old jail property.
The jail closed in 1992 after 133 years and a number of hangings, including the last legal hanging in Massachusetts on Dec. 30, 1898. The city demolished it in 2008 after a failed attempt at attracting a buyer interested in capitalizing on the building’s history.
The Redevelopment Authority took ownership of it from the city in 2009.
A Springfield Newspapers file photo from 1959 of the Hamden County Jail on York Street.
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