With the Boston-area market for life science real estate in free-fall after an orgy of overbuilding during the COVID-19 pandemic, Tuscan Brands is abandoning its plans for a biotech campus at Tuscan Village.
Instead, the mega-development on the site of the old Rockingham Park horse racing track would see its remaining quadrant filled with more retail, another hotel, a second medical office building and a big luxury condominium building.
A proposal filed with Salem officials earlier this month show the four-building, 1.2 million-square-foot industrial complex permitted for labs, drug manufacturing, regular manufacturing or warehouses replaced by seven new structures and a park.
Tuscan Brands already successfully delivered a 5-story medical office building for hospital network Mass General Brigham. The new plan retains a second, matching building next door that was included in the earlier biotech plans.
New to the plan, though, is a 6-story, 133-unit condo building, a 60,000-square-foot, 2-story “furniture/furnishings” store, a 150-key hotel and a 50-unit workforce housing building, plus one restaurant and two fast-food eateries in outbuildings.
An “overlook park” would separate the condos from the development’s main central road.
The changes would total just over 793,000 square feet, down from the nearly 1.3 million square feet currently permitted.

