Dan Haar: An Old Friend Of The New UConn Campus Returns


After the speeches, after the ribbon-cutting, after the cheering at the UConn Hartford branch on Wednesday, Roger Gelfenbien stood on the platform overlooking the main atrium and blurted out an odd recollection.

“I had a great career coming out of this thing,” Gelfenbein said. “This is where I went to school.”

Huh? Classes start at the new campus Monday and Gelfenbein, 74, is long retired from the roles that made him one of Hartford's highest-profile civic leaders and business executives.

Gelfenbien has three connections to the UConn Hartford campus. In all three, he can rightly claim he went to school there. And even though he didn’t have a public role in the festivities, it’s possible the $140 million project would never have happened without him.

As a youngster growing up on Wethersfield Avenue, he worked at the old Hartford Times as a paperboy — and recalled stuffing newspaper inserts into the main paper as they came off the conveyor belt from the presses in the basement.

Gelfenbien also enrolled at UConn at the old Hartford campus on Asylum Avenue, before the move to West Hartford. On Wednesday, standing in front of the giant granite columns, he chatted with his old basketball coach, Dave Daniels, son of the legendary, multisport Wesleyan University coach Norm Daniels.

He considers the new campus to be his alma mater.

His third role makes him an unheralded pioneer of the UConn expansion. In 1997, when Gelfenbien was managing partner at Andersen Consulting in Hartford (later Accenture), then-Gov. John G. Rowland appointed him chairman of the UConn board of trustees.

Gelfenbien oversaw a massive series of building projects known as UConn 2000 (jokingly dubbed UConn $2 billion), and he was among the champions of the downtown Six Pillars and Adriaen’s Landing projects that brought us a wave of apartments, Capital Community College at the old G. Fox building, the convention center, the science center and Front Street, which took decades to complete.

He pushed for a downtown football stadium, which would have been a mistake.

To me, this is a dream come true. This is going to prove that what I wanted to do 100 years ago is correct.— Roger Gelfenbien

But he also pushed for the downtown UConn campus at a time when it wasn’t a popular idea. Gelfenbien quietly lobbied in the General Assembly to move the campus from West Hartford to downtown. The idea died, or hibernated.

Gelfenbien recalled that the undefeated women’s basketball team of 1995 — on which his daughter, Jill, played a nonstarring role — congealed Rowland’s support for UConn. As for the downtown campus, “I don’t remember having a conversation with him about this issue,” Gelfenbien said Wednesday.

Roger Gelfenbien

Back in 1998, I wrote a story about Hartford failing to keep young professionals. Gelfenbien urged construction of the many planned projects. “Let’s go,” he said. “We need to work on our image.”

That’s been a generational effort, as it turns out. “To me, this is a dream come true. This is going to prove that what I wanted to do 100 years ago is correct,” he said Wednesday.

This campus will be a piece of the puzzle, perhaps limited as a commuter campus without dedicated student housing. Gelfenbien, like most everyone at the celebration, sees explosive potential. “Young people bring life to a city. So maybe they’re not sleeping here but they’re out, spending their time in the city.”

A few feet away, Suzanne Hopgood, chairwoman of the Capital Region Development Authority, praised Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, a former mayor, for the project. “He understands how to build a city,” Hopgood said.

And so we carry on into the future, our progress marked by political spats and occasional triumphs like this one.

Those battles are over for Gelfenbien, his 6-foot-3 frame still strong, his white hair still white, his link in the economic chain secure. On the way out he stopped to gently touch one of the columns, the one with the plaque commemorating a campaign speech by John F. Kennedy in 1960 — Gelfenbien’s last year of high school a few blocks away.

He is from this place, even though he saw it Wednesday for the first time.

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