Four sites and nearly 19 acres remain undeveloped in the Mount Pleasant Corporate Center at the doorstep of downtown Scranton, but a regional medical real estate developer brought the much-anticipated complex to life last month with the purchase of a 3.26-acre lot that is expected to yield a 30,000 square foot medical/professional services building and dozens of jobs.
“We’ve done numerous business parks and industrial office parks throughout Lackawanna County, and this project definitely had its fair share of hurdles, so (Beacon Medical Realty’s purchase) is a huge success for us,” says Krysten Kelly, an economic development specialist for the Scranton Chamber of Commerce. “I think our hope is to see more building similar to Beacon’s. Maybe they’ll be interested in additional buildings.”
Beacon purchased the land from the Scranton Lackawanna Industrial Building Corporation, which acquired it from Keystone Concrete Block and Supply. It had its manufacturing operation there before consolidating it with another facility across town. The real estate development partnership, which has designed, developed and managed 1.5 million square feet throughout New Jersey and New York, expects the two-story building to be complete by next fall.
Mount Pleasant is a $7 million project that SLIBCO expects will produce 210,000 square feet of buildings and create 1,000 jobs. Its proximity to downtown–it is near Scranton High School on the corner of Linden Street and Seventh Avenue–and the newly opened Commonwealth Medical College make it especially ripe for fast-tracked development.
“The opportunities are endless,” says Kelly. “We’d love to see the entire park occupied as soon as possible.”
Source: Kristyn Kelly, Scranton Chamber of Commerce
Writer: Joe Petrucci