Norwalk resident Allison McChord is gripping onto a pole while riding inside an ATV behind her husband, Austin McChord, as they take in the sights of a former power plant on Manresa Island.
“I do have motion sickness, but this is so open and there's such a nice breeze that it's perfect,” Allison McChord said.
McChord and her husband are being driven around by Democratic State Senate Majority Leader Bob Duff, an hour after wrapping up a news conference announcing they would turn the island into a public park and community hub.
The couple recently purchased the property for $40 million, according to SCAPE, the architecture firm handling the redesign.
SCAPE announced in a release the 125-acre site will be turned into an accessible park and will host an ecological habitat, as well as a variety of community amenities — from a public beach to thermal pools — and a pier.
Allison McChord said while the space will benefit the public, she is sensitive to any disruptions to the community.
“We don't want to increase traffic, noise, but some of those things come with doing a project like this,” she said. “But the website feedback started to come in, and it just was overwhelmingly positive, and makes you feel so good about what we're doing.”
Jessica Vonashek is the executive director of Manresa Island Corp., the nonprofit working on the development project, along with architecture firms SCAPE and Bjarke Ingels Group.
Vonashek said the project will need environmental remediation and while she says there isn’t a rough timeline yet, she expects much of the space to be ready by the end of the decade.
“We're still exploring it, and we're also exploring the development of the site as well,” Vonashek said. "So we anticipate that parts of the park will be open as soon as possible for the public to be able to enjoy, but we imagine a lot of the programming to be complete by 2030.”
The park will keep a former power plant that used to be operated by NRG Energy until 2013 when it was closed in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. That will be turned into what the release called a community hub.
As for how the McChords were able to buy it, the couple’s fortune largely resulted from Austin McChord’s founding of the company Datto, a data backup company, which he left in 2018.
Allison McChord said she and her husband made the decision to buy the island in much the same manner that many married couples do.
“We were literally making dinner one night, and he said, ‘You know, I think we could probably buy this and turn it into a park,’" she said. "And I said, 'Sure, that sounds great.'”
