“It’s a cool job, and it’s a big job for Springfield,” Nelson says. The project, anticipated to achieve LEED-Gold certification, also includes a cinema, a bowling complex and a seasonal outdoor skating rink that will serve as a marketplace for art exhibits and events in warmer months. The casino complex combines new construction with revived historic buildings that will provide more than 125,000 sq ft of gaming space, a 250-room boutique hotel on Main Street and a spa, in addition to dining and retail venues and a child care facility outside the footprint of the resort. Ultimately, the structure will anchor the city’s South End, while rehabilitation of the $94-million Union Station, completed in June, anchors the North End.

The casino is scheduled to open in fall 2018. Using PDF backgrounds and Bluebeam software, they created a grid that prioritizes work in 11 zones to sequence and phase the project. In fact, logistics for preconstruction and the enabling phases, including utility work, was so complicated that the team implemented a customized coordination system. The team also spent a year discontinuing portions of some roadways, closing others and relocating parking lots for the courthouses around the site before redirecting traffic flow to create one open jobsite. Then in April 2016, the First Spiritualist Church, a 129-year-old Huguenot church listed on the National Register of Historic Places, was lifted onto computerized hydraulic dollies and moved 600 ft to a new foundation to create space on the tight 14-acre site with multiple staging yards and closely scheduled deliveries.

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