Warehouse construction at and near the former Dutch Springs water park, now known as Lake Hydra, is moving ahead.
Developers Trammell Crow Co. (TCC) and Clarion Partners said Monday that Lehigh Valley Trade Center II, at 4939 Hanoverville Road, "is nearing completion and will deliver 527,000 square feet of Class A warehouse and distribution space to the market."
Ground is breaking for Lehigh Valley Trade Center III, on the Dutch Springs site at 4733 Hanoverville Road in Lower Nazareth Township. That project will provide 588,000 square feet of warehouse space and distribution space and be complete by late 2023. Part of that property extends into Bethlehem Township.
The old aqua park is gone, but scuba diving will continue at the quarry lake. DIVE LLC, led by former Northampton County Council President Ken Kraft and dive-shop owner Jim Folk, will operate the lake for recreational diving and for training emergency-response teams.
They have renamed the quarry Lake Hydra. Their proposal to save the quarry for diving was one of several made to the developers, who had no obligation to keep the lake open.
"Along with Clarion, TCC was pleased to have worked with the community and with Ken and Jim from DIVE LLC. to donate a parcel of land to keep the quarry open for divers," Matt Nunn, principal with TCC's Northeast Metro team, said in a statement.
Kraft and Folk thanked TCC and Clarion for working with them to save the scuba venue.
"Without their team's support and understanding, scuba diving in our community would have been lost," Kraft and Folk said in the statement. "It was a pleasure to work with developers who invest back into the communities in which they operate."
The 50-acre quarry is known in the scuba community for its depth and clear water, making it an ideal lake for certification of new divers.
The land and lake were purchased from Recreational Concepts Development Corp., led by Stuart Schooley, for $16.1 million. Recreational Concepts bought the land in 1980 for $97,662.
There will be one single-story building at 4939 Hanoverville Road, known as LVTC II. The height is 40 feet, with 119 dock doors, four drive-in doors, 254 vehicle parking spaces and 154 trailing spaces.
It is being built to Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design silver standards, which set goals for "green" construction and operations.
LVTC III, at the Lake Hydra site, will include two single-story buildings on separate lots. A third parcel of land was donated for the scuba venue.
Nunn of Trammell Crow said the local market for distribution is still booming. The Lehigh Valley's location at the center of the eastern U.S., with highways, an airport and near big cities from Washington, D.C. to Boston, is what attracted the company.
"The Lehigh Valley is a fast-growing market for logistics space," Nunn said in the statement. "This particular area where our project is benefits greatly from the market's strong infrastructure, abundance of labor, and access to major metropolitan cities along the East Coast."
Clarion Partners Vice President Guilherme Palocci said the new warehouses "will be best-in-class, built with many sustainable features and will be attractive to a wide range of tenants."
Peak Construction is the general contractor for Lehigh Valley Trade Center, and KSS Architects is designing the new facilities.
The Lehigh Valley Trade Center industrial park, built by TCC in 2016 and now owned by Clarion, will cover 1.2 million square feet.
Trammell Crow is a subsidiary of Dallas-based CBRE Group Inc. (traded as CBRE on the New York Stock Exchange). CBRE has a market value (current share price times number of shares outstanding) of about $25.7 billion.
TCC, founded in 1948, employs 700 people in 26 major cities across the United States and Europe.
Clarion Partners is a real estate investment manager based in New York. It has $81.4 billion in assets under management.
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