New Jersey
DreamWorks strikes deal for Meadowlands theme park
A rendering of American Dream Meadowlands
DreamWorks Animation last month announced a deal to bring Shrek and other animated movie characters to an amusement park at Triple Five’s planned American Dream entertainment and retail mall in the New Jersey Meadowlands, the New York Times reported. Jeffrey Katzenberg, chief executive of DreamWorks Animation, told the Times the indoor park would involve the studio’s “characters, storytelling and technology in a unique and innovative family entertainment experience,” including rides and a wave pool. The American Dream site will also include 1.7 million square feet of retail space, an indoor ski hill, indoor skydiving, bowling, an aquarium and a live theater. But $1.75 billion in financing needed for the long-delayed project will not be secured until October, Triple Five said, and the complex is not slated to open until September 2014. The New York Giants and New York Jets football teams, which both use the nearby MetLife Stadium, have filed lawsuits seeking to block construction of American Dream, saying the project would worsen traffic in the already congested area. (Triple Five moved last month to dismiss the suit.) Still, the DreamWorks deal was widely viewed as a much-needed bit of good news for American Dream. “This is the first really positive news we have had in some time regarding this project,” East Rutherford Mayor James Cassella told the Bergen Record.
Connecticut
EDAC buys former Pratt & Whitney plant
EDAC Technologies, a designer and manufacturer of components for the aerospace industry, last month said it paid $8.2 million to buy a 293,000-square-foot former Pratt & Whitney plant in Cheshire from United Technologies Corp., the Republican-American reported. EDAC said it will consolidate all of its Connecticut operations, currently housed in six separate buildings in Farmington and Newington, at the 50-acre site, located at 500 Knotter Drive. EDAC had previously purchased a building in Plainville that it had planned to renovate in order to move part of its operations there. But in the same announcement, EDAC said it has instead accepted an offer to sell the Plainville facility to a real estate development company, which intends to redevelop the site.
Westchester County
Kawasaki to pay $25M for factory
Kawasaki Plant
Kawasaki Rail Car has agreed to pay $25 million for the Yonkers factory space it has leased since the 1980s, the Wall Street Journal reported last month. The Japanese manufacturer, which makes many of the cars for the New York subway system, agreed to buy the 239,000-square-foot factory from its landlord, National Resources, and to roughly double the amount of office space it occupies in a nearby building in the same complex. Kawasaki is an anchor tenant in the nine-building complex, which was occupied for decades by Otis Elevator Co. until the early 1980s. Then, in 1999, National Resources purchased the complex and renamed it i.Park Hudson. Kawasaki had been mulling plans to relocate to Nebraska or New Jersey, but more than a year ago, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced that the company would get a $500,000 state grant to stay in Yonkers, provided it retains 375 local jobs. But that grant has been held up while Kawasaki negotiated a deal to buy the factory.