A Conversation On the Redevelopment of the Roebling Center

Image Credits: Clarke Caton Hintz

Lab Design News spoke to David Henderson, principal at Hx2 Development in Trenton New Jersey, Thom Romano, managing director at JLL, and TJ Romano, life sciences specialist at JLL Philadelphia about redeveloping the Roebling Center.

LDN: When you're creating a mixed-use facility, especially when you're having both residents and a lab space, what sort of tips or suggestions, would you provide for creating a successful environment from the conception to the execution for having both of those being supported for tenants and residents?

DH:  I think the quality of space. I think part of the magic of reusing 19th and 20th-century industrial complexes, is you've got the [pieces] that allow for [residential and industrial] uses.

You need a framework that can support all of these uses. Then it becomes a game of sorting out the logistics, but there's nothing clean; manufacturing, residential, hospitality, or office. There are no inherent conflicts. They have some different needs you've got to work out, but there [is a] synergy that occurs between all that.

It's kind of a 20th-century modernist zoning idea that you should separate [all of this], you have office areas that are lively during the day and residential areas lively at night, and nothing's really that lively, and certainly nothing's lively all the time.

[The Roebling Center] is lively all the time.

Thom R: The other thing is that because manufacturing doesn't require a huge amount of parking, there are certainly fewer people that are working in a manufacturing facility. There's a substantial parking lot that's used for the residential component and the office component.

To David's point during the day, [when] the residential people are out, that parking lot is available so that can accommodate those people who are working the manufacturing facility and then, give or take the turnover around five o'clock, four o’clock, six o'clock, as the residential folks come back, the manufacturing and office people are on their way out. There's always activity on the site and it balances itself really well.

Image Credits: Clarke Caton Hintz

TJ R: Also just from a workforce composition standpoint and the type of person who's going to be living in the lofts there's a lot of crossover there. I think that type of employee is looking for the same things that make a loft with a residential environment with connectivity to travel and amenities around it. I think that those two things play off of each other really well in this instance.

LDN: Along with being a mixed-use facility, what else do you think makes this development unique?

Thom R: I would say that the old adage of location. First of all, it's right off of a primary artery into the city. It has a train stop, right?

The building, it is a city with the ability to walk to lots of restaurants and shopping. To TJ's point, you have a pretty significant labor pool in the Trenton area and within a short drive. Within a five-minute drive, you're in Bucks County Pennsylvania which is right over the Delaware River, and from there you can go five minutes to the north and you're in Lawrenceville, so you can pull from a lot of different places and a 10-minute drive you're pulling from Princeton. It sits in a great spot to be able to draw from within a really short drive within close proximity to the labor Pool.

The fact that the building is a hundred plus years old and it's very unique looking.

DH: It has steel factory windows and then clear stories throughout the roofscape. This building is designed to be lit naturally.

Thom R: So presumably, right, you don't need as much lighting, which would bring down your operating expenses for your utility costs and it's a really nice environment to work within typically.

The natural light component, the structure of it, and the construction of it just really makes it a unique building. While there are several of them that are scattered around Trenton, this is the only one that's really in a true redevelopment stage.

DH: [In addition], access to utilities, it's a factory site, and the development thus far is all electric and there's very robust, electric service in the area. Also, whatever you would need in terms of sewer and natural gas. We have a green orientation and as such can bring that expertise, this building can have several hundred kilowatts of solar on the roof. We've got 350 kilowatts. which combined with battery. can be used for power security for a lab or manufacturing tenant, [and] can also be used to reduce peak energy usage, and cut your operating costs so it can be used a couple of different ways.

Also, daylighting, there's a lot of research in the lighting world about circadian rhythm and color temperature's impact on worker productivity. In light-led lighting, which is capable of very sophisticated things as being designed to mimic the circuit, the light pattern of a diurnal cycle to health and productivity in a building like this, you don't really have to do that, you've got it because the building is a wash from blue light in the morning to yellow light in the late afternoon. It happens naturally. Just like it does outside so there's the ability to be naturally ventilated that's probably not applicable to pharma use.

In an office, coming out during Covid we got into all sorts of things with ventilation and air quality and whatnot and the buildings ideally suited to perform on those metrics.

I [also]can't probably stress enough the timeline advantage, we have primary planning board approval for part of the site, and we could very quickly turn to do the work that needs to be done on the shelf to make it ready for fit-out and you compare that with what can sometimes be upwards of years on Greenfield sites for approvals alone.

Not to mention, the utility site shell structure; if someone has approval and needs to produce something or needs to move forward with R&D and production, we can deliver space on a timeline that probably nobody else can.

LDN: And from a life science standpoint, what would make this facility unique for tenants compared to other facilities that are already existing in the market?

DH: I would say the quality of the space. I mean we're talking clear ceiling, heights of 18 to 24 feet which is exceptional in lab buildings, day lit, It has very interesting steel trusses which would likely be exposed so it has that early 20th-century industrial vibe.

I think, given the open floor plan, there's a lot of flexibility for how you lay it out and how you mix various uses and I think you could mix easily office lab and manufacturing in a hundred thousand foot suite, and you could also do mix lab and manufacturing or all manufacturing. It can be used in a lot of ways and it could change over time.

Also, I think the proximity to Princeton, it's easy on the train, there's a train connection from Alexander Road to literally our site. It's not a very difficult drive so there's a lot of R&D happening there and in the university, I would say aggressively looking to generate spinoffs and research-related businesses.

TJ R: The flexibility of a large floor plate is unique especially if you're doing an office-to-lab conversion that can usually be a little bit more challenging because you have one wing. The lab’s face is available [and] is either kind of like single-story flex buildings.

This is a really rare opportunity. Just as an example, if you were to go to Boston, everything is in old brick buildings, if you're in Cambridge and you're seeing all these old brick buildings, the interiors are filled with laboratories, we have nothing like that in New Jersey, and so, I think that the design and aesthetic component mixed with the use is something that is completely lacking in this market. and that this would be an opportunity to marry those two things together.

LDN: Thom had mentioned that there were no expenses that were spared for this project and that was somewhat unique. Could you talk a little bit more about that and then also perhaps just a little bit into the budget planning?

Thom R: Building 110, they renovated the existing windows, gorgeous big old-time windows, and they renovated as many of the existing windows as they could. Then they matched, exactly, the windows that were there, and that cost of fortune, and a lot of people would have probably rebranded the openings and would have put less expensive windows but they matched the windows.

Image Credits: Clarke Caton Hintz

They rebuilt the second floor, and they had a company come in to do a timber construction frame within the building to make it look like it did when it was originally built and just to stay within historically the way that the building was designed, and the elements that were left behind in the building, they made sure that structurally that the building was sound so they could leave those elements. They really had an architectural eye toward this, and it shows.

DH: I would say as a strategy, we look to restore the bones of things that we think are valuable. Then we insert the new stuff into the bones and the beauty of that is the new stuff can be relatively simple.

While we do spend extra dollars restoring the bones compared to actually getting the quality of space it's cheaper [than] if we were doing a new build, and you can't get the history or the vibe that's intangible with new stuff.

LDN: You had mentioned a little bit about the sustainability of the development, could you expand a little bit more about that?

DH: Rolling Lofts, which was the first piece [of the development] to open is LEED certification gold-level. For the office buildings, we didn't actually go through the certification process but used a lot of the same technologies and materials, and methodologies to save energy and create healthy space and reduce writing costs.

Our buildings are typically all-electric efficiency, heat pump, LED lighting, and high-efficiency windows, where we replace them, so all the systems are very efficient.

LDN: What are your favorite parts about the development?

DH: The oldest building on site is the office structure, which has a wood truss and there's some space left it is really lovely. Also, the physical envelope, the space of the Building.114 is so dramatic and you just get these amazing expanses, of the open floor plan with this tracery of steel, truss up above coming through and I love the building in particular.

Then on the other side, I really love to see it animated, so it's amazing to see the community that's occurred at rolling lofts, it's diverse by every metric, and with the office community that's established in building 110 it's really fun to see those things come alive.

LDN: Is there anything else that you'd like to add or mention?

DH: Trenton probably wouldn't be on a list of pharma centers.

I would say if you look at the kinds of attributes that the industry wants for a facility, everything from timeline to physical space, transit, environment for workers, etc. That this space pretty much checks, all the boxes so, so I don't think you have to be a visionary to move here, but I think maybe you have to be willing to objectively look at the little metrics and run the numbers.

You might not have thought of Trenton first. Austin might have been a place you thought of before us for example but if you look at the data match-up, I think this is a great opportunity and someone is going to discover this and be very happy because I think it really is an ideal site for this in a market where there's very little space.

The dialogue in this article has been edited for the purposes of accuracy, length, and clarity.