This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate
The historic Rocky Glen Falls mill building that serves as offices today, in October 2022 on Glen Road in Newtown, Conn.
A former mill building at 75 Glen Road in Newtown, Conn., one of two converted office buildings that are part of the Rocky Glen Falls complex that is up for auction in October 2022.
A portrait of Charles Goodyear in New Haven, Conn.
A cascade at Rocky Glen State Park in Newtown, Conn., where the family of vulcanized rubber innovator Charles Goodyear owned a mill complex that is up for auction in October 2022.
Toy ducks float in 2017 down the Pootatuck River in Newtown, Conn., not far from where rubber innovator Charles Goodyear's family had a mill complex that is now used as offices.
Each year toy ducks take the plunge into the Pootatuck River, in an annual fundraiser by the Newtown Lions Club. Now a mill office complex fronting the stream is for sale, connected to the man whose breakthrough expanded the use of rubber to any number of everyday items, from the rubber ducks of yore to automobile tires.
The Rocky Glen Falls office complex is going up for auction the last week of October, with more than 250,000 views on the LoopNet commercial real estate website for the property just outside the village of Sandy Hook.
The complex was once owned by the family of Charles Goodyear, and possibly a site where he conducted experiments to hone the process of vulcanizing rubber, in addition to Naugatuck.
Goodyear is thought to have stumbled across the process by accident while on a sales call with a general store, after mistakenly dropping a mix of rubber and sulfur he was showcasing onto a hot stove, hardening the rubber. With rubber products prone at the time to losing their shape in hot weather or solidifying in cold, Goodyear realized the process could solve both problems, creating a far tougher product that still retained some pliability.
Vulcanized rubber would transform industries, most notably the automotive industry which adapted vulcanized rubber for tires, but with the material also put to use for coats, shoe soles, hoses, conveyor belts and toys. That puts Goodyear on the short list of the most influential U.S. inventors with Connecticut connections, including Samuel Colt, Igor Sikorsky Eli Whitney and Jonathan Rothberg.
The auction website Ten-X will start the bidding at $3.1 million for the two buildings across the narrow Pootatuck River from Rocky Glen State Park, one overlooking a small cascade. Newtown last appraised the larger of the two buildings at 75 Glen Road at $3.5 million, and the smaller building at 27 Glen Road at $1.1 million.
Town records list the New York City-based real estate developer Madison Properties as a co-owner, along with a limited liability company called Rocky Glen which is affiliated with a contract manufacturer called Iconix on Hauppauge, N.Y. Madison Properties also owns Constitution Plaza in Hartford.
Emails to the two companies did not generate immediate responses on the decision to put the buildings up for auction.
Between October 2021 and this past June, office landlords in Fairfield County had strung together three consecutive quarters of positive "absorption" in the industry parlance — leasing more space than tenants were exiting — in the most recent update from Cushman & Wakefield. It is a streak matched only by only a dozen of roughly 90 city and regional office markets tracked by Cushman & Wakefield, with Boston the only other in the Northeast.
But even with those new tenants, Fairfield County office owners remain short of the occupancies they had as of June 2021 a year into the pandemic. In the first six months of this year, Cushman & Wakefield tracked 170,000 square feet of space going back onto the greater Danbury market, but the overall vacancy rate of 22.3 percent was better than several other Connecticut office markets.
Tower Realty handles lease queries for the Rocky Glen Falls complex and said the buildings have appeal for small businesses drawn toward loft-style spaces with exposed beams, brick and vintage hardwood floors. Forecast International recently took a lease at 75 Glen Road for its headquarters, with the company providing market research on aerospace and defense industries.
The larger Bleachery complex in New Milford has had similar success under Fischel Properties in redeveloping a former mill to carve out individual office suites. With many people continuing to work from home since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Consalvo said he thinks offices in historic structures will stay in demand for small businesses looking for a visually appealing alternative to standard office buildings.
"We've had good success filling it up," said Mick Consalvo, a broker with Tower Realty. "They've reconfigured spaces to enable a tenant to have just one room, or to have ... 3,000 square feet."
Includes prior reporting by Eric Ofgang.
Alex.Soule@scni.com; @casoulman