New Plans For Old Furniture Factory
Photo/Patrick Donlin
CREATIVE REUSE: Data Guide Cable has purchased the old Nichols & Stone complex in Gardner. Some parts of the aging complex are slated to be torn down.
Across Central Massachusetts, old mill buildings are a perennial problem.
When a factory closes down after decades of operation in a city center, the facility is often too outdated for a new manufacturer to use and too expensive to tear down. Absent a demand for funky, high-ceilinged condominiums, old mills can sit empty for years, creating an attractive nuisance for local teenagers and a headache for police and firefighters.
So when furniture maker Nichols & Stone closed down in Gardner in 2008, the city was lucky that one of the factory’s neighbors was another manufacturer, Data Guide Cable Corp.
Data Guide owner Don Irving ended up buying the Nichols & Stone property, and he’s now in the process of moving his company’s operations into the newest of the buildings and tearing down seven others. Ultimately, he hopes to create a retail development in the area, combining land from Data Guide’s old property and the new space.
Ditching The Elevators
Irving said the immediate value of the deal was moving his company from a terribly inefficient building to more suitable ones. The 60-person cable manufacturer had been located in a 1910 mill with huge glass windows, where material had to be moved up and down elevators.
“It’s just a very inefficient building to be in,” Irving said.
He said about three-quarters of Data Guide’s equipment and employees have already moved to a 1980s-era, single-story, three-building complex on the Nichols & Stone campus. The shift removes the $50,000-plus annual expense of running two elevators, dramatically simplifies the production process and saves thousands of gallons of heating oil.
Many manufacturers looking for new digs would rather find a building in an industrial park on the outskirts of a city. Robert Hubbard, director of community development and planning for Gardner, said demolishing the sort of old buildings that came with the Nichols & Stone property can be complicated, especially if there’s asbestos or other dangerous materials.
“It’s expensive,” Hubbard said.
But Irving said his situation made the Nichols & Stone property a sensible investment.
For one thing, it was a good deal. According to city records, he paid just $400,000 for the parcel, which is assessed at nearly $3.3 million. The assessed value of the land alone is $581,300.
While Irving acknowledged that demolishing the unusable buildings is expensive, he said he has time on his side since there’s no hurry to build anything in the current market. He’s already knocked down five buildings and said he could take a few more years to clear up the other two.
“I can peck away at this at my leisure,” he said.
Retail Down The Road
Working with Leominster engineering firm Whitman & Bingham Associates, Irving has developed preliminary plans for a retail center with more than 125,000 square feet of commercial space, an idea similar to one that another developer had floated before the recession. Hubbard said the city is supportive of that sort of use, even though it would require a zoning change to allow retail development in what’s now an industrial-zoned area.
“It’s within the [city’s] urban renewal area,” Hubbard said. “It was identified as a logical spot for retail development.”
Irving said he isn’t seeking any government funding to help with the project, but Hubbard said it’s possible the city or state might eventually kick in some money to help mitigate traffic problems caused by a new development.
Irving said he knows the land is more likely to be useful as retail space than for the industrial uses it’s zoned for.
“I’m not a real strong retail guy,” he said. “I can tell you right now, if you want to buy a nice dress shirt in the city of Gardner, you can’t do it. I guess there’s a message there.”
Irving spent his early career as a teacher designing and building houses over the summers for extra cash, and he said he plans to take a hands-on approach to the project, if and when it does move forward.
Still, he said his real work remains squarely in his manufacturing business, with the proposed retail development relegated to a distinctly lower status.
“It’s a fun project,” Irving said. “I look at it as something to do on the side.”
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