Youth Academy   Pushes Toward Opening Date

By Kendra Bobowick

At last glance in early May, an industrial crane was hoisting walls into position and crews on the ground maneuvered the massive slabs with ropes and pulleys. Now with the poured-in-place construction finished and a roof over its head, the privately funded, roughly 89,000-square-foot Newtown Youth Academy adding its silhouetted to the Fairfield Hills skyline is nearly complete.

“We move fast,” said academy developer Peter D’Amico. He is at last seeing the results of a years-long desire to personally provide a sports complex for the town’s youth and residents. Like others involved in the project, he turns his attention toward an opening date of November 1 — a target date that has remained fixed since work began. Academy Board of Directors member Keith Miller ran down the list of massive interior spaces that will make room — rain or shine, and in all four seasons — for team athletics. In two wings off a main entrance lobby is the field house, which is a 39,000-square-foot space for basketball, tennis, and a multipurpose gymnasium. The turf building, roughly 30,000 square feet, offers space for soccer and lacrosse, for example. A front lobby and second floor offices and a fitness center also fit comfortably into the remaining square footage.

Fitting in with the former state hospital’s brick façades and modest entryways, the Newtown Youth Academy’s size — swallowed in the hay fields and open meadows beneath an uninterrupted skyline — is deceiving. From the interior, however, the ceilings soar and work vans shrink as drivers cross the slab floors to deliver supplies. “You just don’t have any idea of how massive the building [is],” Mr Miller said.

With the roof, wall studding, electrical, plumbing, site grading, and other tasks nearly complete, Mr D’Amico will soon tackle Greenwich House demolition and install permanent parking, which he had offered to do in lieu of the town completing the tasks. Officials recently made the decision to hand the demolition and parking to Mr D’Amico, rather than installing temporary parking until funds became available for a permanent lot. Essentially Mr D’Amico will complete the $3.5 million project and the town will pay him back. The agreement was approved as an amendment to his lease for land at the former state hospital campus.

“My philosophy? Do it right the first time,” Mr D’Amico said. The lot will sit on the site of Greenwich House, which now stands between the Newtown Youth Academy at the very back of the campus, and Bridgeport Hall, which is being remodeled to house municipal and education department offices.

Part of his plans for “doing it right” includes the environment. He is building green (using environmentally friendly building practices). Why? “It’s the right thing to do.” Possibly thinking of his own children and grandchildren who had attended a groundbreaking in February, and months later witnessed the walls going up on a warm day in early May, he said, “We’re looking at this for the kids, for health, for the future. Clean and green; it’s time we move in that direction.”

By November, Newtown will have one of the greenest pieces of new construction in the area. The academy construction follows the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System, which, according to the US Green Building Council’s website, is a third-party certification program and the nationally accepted benchmark for the design, construction, and operation of high performance green buildings. LEED provides building owners and operators with the tools they need to have an immediate and measurable impact on their building’s performance. Much of the materials inside the academy will be made of recycled materials, and the structure will be equipped with one of the largest solar generation systems on a privately funded building in the state, Mr D’Amico confirmed. Solar Works Inc, which has a Connecticut office, will install the system.

Earlier this year Mr D’Amico had mentioned his hope to educate students about the renewable energy sources. By late last week he had an idea in mind. He described a solar display screen set up in the building. “It’s a TV screen, visible so people can see how much solar it’s producing,” he said.

Bringing the project closer to completion each day are crews from architect and general contractor Claris Construction Inc, Lindade Construction at work on the interior, Roger Electric, Sousa Plumbing, site contractors Site Services, among a longer list of contractors on the job. This week job supervisor Fernando Goncalves’s phone rang again and again as he fielded calls and walked the site where workers pieced together the Newtown Youth Academy.