The Future of Norwich State Hospital

Utopia Considers Property

The Labor and Public Employees Committee and Commerce Committee held a joint information hearing on the development of the Norwich State Hospital property. 

Representatives from Utopia Studios gave a presentation with artist’s renderings of their proposal. Their proposal is a $500 million project that will take twelve years to complete. Their proposal includes building a hotel and convention center, child center, a City Walk with retail stores, and Hollywood entertainment and arts center. The Hollywood entertainment and arts center would include television and movie studios. 

Their facility would also include a theme park and water park. The City Walk portion would be themed “Recreating History and Future” with each portion of the project appropriately themed to a decade. The child’s center would be on the parcel of land south of the Route 2A bridge. They also proposal putting in a Performing Arts school and want to keep some of the old Gothic-style hospital buildings for this purpose along with several houses that are on the state-owned property. The hotel and convention center would be separate from the entertainment and arts center. They propose installing a monorail system so people can go from one part of the complex to the other and plan to build a marina on the beachfront (Thames River) portion and use the rail line that runs through the site. 

They explain that their company would have unionized workers and that they are not asking for any subsidies or grants for their project. The project would be a major economic revitalization to the area and has backing from Wall Street and Hollywood. 

There are already talented people in the northeast who work in Hollywood that would benefit from this project because these types of jobs would be made available in Connecticut. There would be different high wage employee types.