The Lights Are Back On at Wintonbury Mall. What Comes Next for Bloomfield Center?

At about 4:30 a.m. on Saturday, September 26, electricians restored power to every tenant and common area at Wintonbury Mall. The outage had lasted almost two weeks. Three days later, in a September 29 release, the Town of Bloomfield said the businesses were back to normal operations.

The blackout came at an awkward time for Bloomfield Center. That same month, two separate plans for the center's future moved forward. One has a developer, a funding plan, and a target date for construction. The other is still a concept drawing waiting for a partner. The first is at the Bloomfield Avenue and Gabb Road gateway. The second covers the core around the Town Green, and Wintonbury Mall sits inside it. So the change will start at the center's edge and work inward. Until it gets there, the shops that just got their power back are the center everyday Bloomfield actually uses.

Twelve days and one underground vault

The outage started on September 14. Contractors had scheduled a one-day service interruption to do electrical work, and afterward they could not bring full service back. The town later said the problem traced back to an underground electrical vault under the mall's vacant movie theater. Contractors found damaged conductors and splices in Manhole 47, with signs of a short circuit. Tenant spaces are fed through a network of those vaults, so the building official ordered the whole system checked before power came back. Repairs were reported two days later, but the tests that followed turned up more failures.

That left about a dozen small businesses closed or running on temporary generators, according to the town. The building had no heat or air conditioning the whole time. Tenants without their own generators went 12 days without power. According to the Hartford Courant, the town says that over the next few weeks, officials will talk about how Bloomfield might help the affected businesses recover.

Who stayed open, and who is back

News coverage during the outage named these Wintonbury Mall businesses:

• Carbone's Kitchen, the mall's Italian-American restaurant, stayed open the whole time on a large generator.
• Dutch Point Credit Union also brought in a generator and kept operating.
• Zavee, the tailor shop, had been closing early because its small generator couldn't run for long.
• Rootswear Designs was named by WTNH as one of the mall's businesses.
• Stewart's Barbershop was named in WFSB's coverage.

Some businesses missing from that list are gone for good, which is worth knowing before you head over. Pasticceria Italia, the mall's Italian bakery, closed last winter. The Ginza restaurant and the movie theater left earlier. Monique Burgos, owner of Inspired by HER and the Her Space studio, was a mall tenant through 2023 before moving her space across the street.

For the small service shops that had little or no backup power, the two weeks after reopening are when regular customers matter most. Many of them do work you'd usually save for a weekend errand: alterations, haircuts, banking.

The mall is one of six parcels on the town's list

The town had already put the mall on its redevelopment list before the power failed. In August, Bloomfield asked for developers to rebuild the six-property core of its town center, with proposals due September 15. The six properties are the town-owned Town Green, the Wintonbury Mall property, a Bank of America parcel, the gas station at Park and Jerome avenues, a package store on Wintonbury Avenue, and the former depot property across Jerome Avenue. All of them except the green are privately owned.

The town's Town Center Master Plan, adopted in May 2025, shows what could go there:

For a sense of scale, the whole Wintonbury Mall today is roughly 110,000 square feet. The concept puts back a bit over half that much retail and adds restaurants that face a larger green instead of a parking lot.

All of this is still a sketch. Any developer the town picks has to show it can get up to $15 million in capital right away. Most uses on the site need a special permit, and the area is one of Bloomfield's three tax increment financing districts. Restaurants on the green are a concept the town has drawn, not a project anyone has scheduled.

The gateway has a construction target

A half-mile or so down Bloomfield Avenue, things are further along. On the evening of September 24, developer Paul Butler presented the fourth and final phase of his Town Center Apartments to the Town Plan and Zoning Commission. The 214-unit building at the corner of Bloomfield Avenue and Gabb Road comes with about $4 million in public improvements. Butler expects to file a formal site plan in late winter and wants to start construction in the spring.

Most of his presentation was about what people who never set foot in the building would see. According to the commission minutes and Hartford Business Journal's coverage, the plan includes:

1. A public dog park with separate areas for large and small dogs. It would sit on a utility-owned parcel across Bloomfield Avenue under a 200-year lease that Eversource agreed to after three and a half years of negotiation. The apartment owner would maintain it under a contract with the town.
2. Public parking on the same parcel, with 20 spaces set aside for Bloomfield residents on top of the parking the apartments need. Butler told commissioners there would be enough guest parking that the dog park spaces stay open to the public.
3. A raised crosswalk on Gabb Road, which the town asked for, at a cost of about $250,000. Butler said it is part of a larger traffic-calming project for which the state awarded Bloomfield $913,000.
4. A small park at the corner, made by setting the building back from the intersection, plus heavy landscaping at the entrance to Bloomfield Center and a bus shelter.

Butler said the building would look three stories tall at the corner, since the first floor sits below grade because of the slope. The design would use stone and wood. Planning and Zoning Director Jon Colman said town staff support the proposal, pointing to Butler's willingness to pay for the Gabb Road improvements and the public amenities.

This was an informal presentation, not an approval. Even so, the gateway has a named developer, a parcel he controls, a signed utility lease, and a season he's aiming to start construction. The core is still at the proposal stage.

The center between now and spring

Until either project breaks ground, Bloomfield Center is the version that's there now, and the fall calendar has a few reasons to stop by.

• Tuesday, October 6, 4 to 6 p.m. Prosser Library, 1 Tunxis Avenue, holds a free exhibition and reception for Mark Despres and James Pinder. At 6 p.m. the same night, paranormal researcher Joe Franke talks about the real cases behind Hollywood horror films.
• Saturdays, October 10, 17, 24 and 31, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. The Bloomfield Farmers Market runs at Filley Park on Tunxis Avenue. On rainy days it moves to 330 Park Avenue. Wintonbury Mall is a short drive away if you want to stop at the tailor or the barber on the way home.
• Saturday, December 5. Light Up the Town is listed at the Town Hall lawn and parking lot. Last year's parade and tree lighting were on the Town Green at 2 Tunxis Avenue, so check the location before you go.

The next public step for the gateway is Butler's site plan filing, expected in late winter. The next step for the core is the town naming whoever answered its September 15 call for proposals.

At the Marshall & Ostop Team, we keep an eye on which Bloomfield plans have dates attached and which are still drawings, because the difference matters when you're deciding what to do with your own home. If you'd like to talk about how the Gabb Road gateway or the town center plan could affect your street, schedule a complimentary home consultation and we'll go through what's been decided so far.