Brick Yard welcomes its first tenants
Businesses have started to occupy the newly constructed office buildings in the mixed-use Brick Yard development, located off Route 1 between Contee and Muirkirk roads.
Of the seven completed office buildings in the complex, three were bought by area businesses and one is being leased.
A 44,000-square-foot building, which sits near the entrance, was bought by Freestate Electric, which designs, installs and maintains electrical systems.
The other two sold buildings were bought by American Mechanical Services, AMS, which provides energy and plumbing services, and Floor Max (formerly Carpet and Things), a supplier and installer of flooring and carpeting.
A portion of the fourth office building, 82,000 square feet, was leased by Party Rental, a supplier of a wide-range of party materials.
"It's turning into a nice corporate headquarters park with a mixture of light industrial businesses," said Thomas Aylward, vice president of Jackson-Shaw, the Brick Yard's developer. "Other office parks like Konterra are filled up, so we feel we have a first-class project that doesn't exist in the market with the openness and quality that we offer."
Colleen Clayton, marketing director for Floor Max, a five-store chain that has had offices in Laurel for more than 20 years, said they saw moving to the Brick Yard as a way to keep a presence in Laurel at a time when company officials needed a facility that would allow them to expand.
"In addition to our flooring business, we're going to start doing bathroom remodeling and countertops for kitchens and bathrooms," Clayton said. "We have a much larger facility here where we have a 6,000-square-foot showroom, 30,000-square-foot warehouse and our administrative offices are upstairs."
Floor Max will have a formal ribbon cutting on Sept. 23 and a grand opening the following weekend. Freestate and AMS are currently open for business.
When it is eventually completed, the $500 million Brick Yard complex, which sits on 125 acres of land at the site of a former brick manufacturing plant, will consist of 11 office buildings and 1,300 residences.
Last year, Jackson-Shaw officials predicted the project would be further along at this point, but just like most real estate development projects, construction at the Brick Yard has slowed down due to the recession.
"We're 60 percent occupied, but we need more tenants before we start any new buildings," Aylward said.
In addition to office building starts being stalled, construction has not started on any of the 380 townhouses, 51 single-family homes and 860 multi-level apartments slated to be built at the Brick Yard. With the glut of unsold homes nationwide, many builders have put new construction on hold until the housing market bounces back.
"We believe that the market will come back, but you probably won't see any construction on the housing here until 2010," Aylward said. "We're still getting inquiries, so we know it's definitely coming back. Right now, it's not pleasant, but we didn't get started (on housing construction), so we don't have infrastructure that's unoccupied, which puts us in a good position."
Other work around the Brick Yard has been completed, such as the extension of Mid Atlantic Boulevard to Contee Road, and a path leading to an area referred to as dinosaur park because of shark and dinosaur bones unearthed there.
"We've done landscaping around it and fenced it (dinosaur park) in and have an entrance and parking," Aylward said. "That area has significant scientific value and it won't be developed, but protected. We built a walking path where people will be able to walk up to the fence or sit around the area but not go in."
The seating along the landscaped ground surrounding the park is made of slabs of flooring taken from buildings in the old brick yard facility.
The project is LEEDS-certified (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design), and much of the material from the old Washington Brick Company, which operated at the site from the early 1900s until 1992, is being used in the new development or recycled.
According to Aylward, several thousand tons of steel from the demolished brick company's buildings was shipped to Bethlehem Steel in Baltimore for reuse, and crushed brick from the former facility's kiln was used on the complex's parking surfaces.
Additionally, Aylward said they still plan to turn the old brick company's office building into a coffee or sandwich shop in the residential section of the development, once the economy improves and that construction gets going.
Alyward said, "We've slowed a bit now, but we're still making deals and getting calls of interest."
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