Amazon confirms second Worcester warehouse
Photo | Grant Welker
The former site of TE Connectivity at 125 Goddard Memorial Dr. in Worcester was redeveloped into an Amazon facility.
Amazon has confirmed it is moving into not just one but two planned Worcester fulfillment centers.
The e-commerce giant said late Tuesday it will move into the former TE Connectivity manufacturing site at 125 Goddard Memorial Drive near Worcester Regional Airport early next year. That site, like another proposed for the Greendale Mall site, is planned as a so-called last-mile center that helps Amazon quickly deliver orders.
The TE Connectivity site, which is being remade after sitting vacant for roughly two years, will cover 177,000 square feet. A planned warehouse at the Greendale Mall would be slightly smaller at 121,000 square feet.
Both sites would add to a quickly ballooning footprint in Central Massachusetts for Amazon. The company is building a second fulfillment center in Milford and has others in Bellingham and Northborough.
The site on Goddard Memorial Drive was given approval in August for parking lot changes by the Worcester Planning Board. Those proposed changes gave hints that a tenant could be Amazon: electricity connections for electric vehicles.
"There really is a function of the ultimate tenant demand there," Brandon Kelly, the president and CEO of site owner R.J. Kelly of Burlington, told the Planning Board. "The infrastructure is there so we can accommodate it."
The site will employ hundreds of workers with pay starting at $15 an hour, Amazon said.
R.J. Kelly paid $7.2 million in September to buy the site from TE Connectivity, a Swiss electrical components company that was the successor to a merger with Madison Cable Corp.
That Amazon warehouse will come online before another planned Worcester one that went before the Planning Board for approval this month. Finard Properties of Boston, which bought the Greendale Mall last December for $7.1 million, is proposing to knock down the mall and build a fulfillment center on roughly the same footprint.
The Greendale Mall, which had been suffering from high vacancy in recent years, has a single tenant remaining: a T.J. Maxx and HomeGoods store. It would be the first shopping mall in New England to be converted into warehouse use, according to the national real estate firm CBRE.
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They completely destroyed hiking and biking trails behind that building.
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