Middlesex Co. Takes Heldrich Hotel Ownership, Students To Train There

NEW BRUNSWICK, NJ — The Heldrich Hotel and conference center in New Brunswick will be repurposed into a professional training ground for Middlesex County students who want to enter the hospitality and other fields.

The 375,000-square-foot, 11-story hotel will be "re-imagined as a professional development hub for a range of studies including hospitality, culinary, construction management, business administration and trades including HVAC or electrical," Middllesex County officials announced from a press conference held at the hotel Thursday.

The Heldrich is owned and financed by the Middlesex County Improvement Authority, but it also had private owners. In a $16-million investment this summer by Middlesex County, the county will now completely own and control the hotel.

The Heldrich hotel, which also has a conference center, will remain a fully operational hotel for guests to book rooms or conference space. Students from Middlesex College (the county's community college) and Middlesex County magnet schools (the county's vo-tech high schools) will have access to interactive, real-world training, internships, externships and potentially full-time employment at the hotel. Middlesex County students will learn hands-on alongside the Heldrich's unionized employees.

There is a lot of new development and changes coming to New Brunswick:

• The Jack & Sheryl Morris Cancer Center, New Jersey’s first freestanding cancer hospital, is nearly completed and scheduled to open before the end of 2024.
• Rutgers, Princeton University, Hackensack Meridian and RWJBarnabas have plans to come together under one roof in downtown New Brunswick, in a campus that will be called the New Jersey Innovation + Technology Hub — just "The Hub" or for short. It's an idea strongly backed by Gov. Phil Murphy.
• The HUB will be a 10-story, 550,000-square-foot, $665 million complex on Albany Street, right across from New Brunswick's NJ Transit/Amtrak station. Murphy envisions it as New Jersey's answer to Google's Mountain View campus or Silicon Valley, a place where products like the next iPhone, or a new life-saving cancer treatment will be invented. The HUB should open in 2026.
• Israel's Tel Aviv University already signed on to be the first tenant in the HUB.
• One building in the HUB will be the new home of Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School.
• Other buildings in the Hub will be the HELIX (New Jersey Health + Life Science Exchange), which are innovation and research labs.
• And Nokia Bell Labs announced last December they will leave their current headquarters in Murray Hill (Berkeley Heights in Union County) and will relocate to the HELIX in 2028. Nokia will relocate approximately 1,000 employees to New Brunswick, and intends to make New Brunswick their new global headquarters for research & development.

"The county's investment in the Heldrich Hotel & Conference Center is an investment in the continued economic growth of Middlesex County and New Brunswick," said New Brunswick Mayor Jim Cahill. "The real-life, hands-on educational opportunities that the students will experience will well prepare them for exciting and diverse careers."

Nokia Will Leave Union County, Relocate Headquarters To New Brunswick (Dec. 2023)

Tel Aviv University The Newest Tenant At Rutgers' Tech Hub (2021)