AVONDALE, La. — The old shipyard on the Mississippi River in Avondale, La., is getting its first new building in about half a century. Maritime and industrial company T. Parker Host said it will put $50 million into Avondale Global Gateway, its riverfront industrial campus in Jefferson Parish just upriver from New Orleans.
The centerpiece is a 200,000-square-foot warehouse, the first structure built on the site since the 1970s. The company also plans to bring a fifth deepwater dock online, which would let the campus handle as many as six ships at once.
The money is split across six buckets. Rail work and the new warehouse each get about $15 million. Dock upgrades, internal roads, extra site and laydown space, and new equipment each get roughly $5 million.
The company says the work is meant to keep up with current customers who are growing and to have ground ready for firms weighing long-term manufacturing and logistics operations. It expects the upgrades could draw hundreds of millions of dollars in added private investment from tenants.
Jobs are part of the pitch. HOST expects to add around 100 positions, which would push its own Avondale headcount past 400. As tenant projects come along, the company projects a daily crowd of about 1,000 workers on the campus by 2028.
Company chairman and CEO Adam Anderson framed the spending as a way to have infrastructure already in place when businesses look at Louisiana for their next big project. The company did not give a finish date for the warehouse or the dock work.
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