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The Salem News - April 9, 2008
Focus:
A city within the city at Beverly office park
The Salem
News
BEVERLY — It wouldn't be fair to pigeonhole the Cummings Center as an office park. General Manager Steve Drohosky calls the 2 million-square-foot facility "a little city," and for good reason.
The vast complex holds all the odds and ends you would expect to find in a city. On site are corporate offices and research and development labs, classrooms for a local college, a dance studio, banks and a post office. You can visit the dentist, eat a meal and drop off your dry cleaning, all on site. There's even a church.
"It is open to all," said Steve Drohosky, general manager of the Cummings Center. "One of our trademarks is that we offer a broad cross-section of businesses with our multi-use facilities."
The 468 tenants in the Cummings Center fill 82 percent of the available space. The largest occupancy rate was in 2000 when it was 90 percent full, Drohosky said, but that was when there was less space to fill.
In 2003, the Cummings Center added what has been called the "crown jewel" of the commerce park, the 500 Cummings Center building. Drohosky calls it a "first-class office building" on par with the high rises in Boston — only without the commute. Most of the park's vacancies are in this newer building, he said.
Located 18 minutes north of Boston, the Cummings Center offers a step away from the hustle and bustle of the city and allows tenants to enjoy a slice of the 77-acre waterfront property, flanked by two scenic ponds.
The location wasn't always so scenic.
Before the Cummings Center opened in 1996, the site was home to a large reinforced concrete building owned by the United Shoe Machinery Corp, known locally as The Shoe. Cummings Properties gave it an $80 million, top-to-bottom restoration.
Most tenants rent between 1,000 and 6,000 square feet of space, but larger and smaller units are available. The largest tenant is Thermo Fisher Scientific, at 150,000 square feet; the smallest, a 146-square-foot office leased by a local real estate broker.
Drohosky said the most immediate project in the works is constructing a parking deck that will add 180 spaces. Space has also been approved to build a hotel on the property, but Drohosky said there are no immediate plans for construction.
Cummings Center by the Numbers
Square feet - 2,000,000
Acres - 90
Largest tenant - Thermo Fisher Scientific (150,000 square feet)
Smallest tenant - Andrea D'Amato, real estate broker (146 square feet)
Workers on site - about 4,500
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