Vacant mills hold dangers and opportunities for Western Mass. communities

The sound Thomas Kulig heard when he was barbecuing one afternoon in July 2022 wasn’t grease spattering.

It was the town of Russell’s biggest fear coming true: One of the long-vacant Strathmore Mills next to Kulig’s home was burning.

The three former paper mills in Russell are among dozens of vacant industrial buildings that dot the landscape of small towns and large cities across the state. They are eyesores and hazards as well as potential opportunities all wrapped up in a giant package of concrete, steel and wood.

“It was astonishing,” Kulig, a Russell selectman, said about the 2022 fire. “I had Easthampton or Westhampton fire trucks sitting in my driveway ready to spray down my trees and my house. It was all afternoon through the next day.”

Two weeks ago, Kulig watched the collapse of the part of the nearby Mill Number One that had been largely unscathed by the fire two years ago but had deteriorated after being vacant for decades. Three workers who had been removing beams from the building were injured.

That’s not all. In 2020, Mill Number Two was destroyed as well in a massive fire that burned for days.

The 130-year-old mills have been empty since International Paper shut down in 1999. They have changed hands multiple times, with owners proposing veterans’ housing, a cannabis grow facility and most recently a $35-$45 million condominium complex with basketball courts and a boat ramp, Kulig said.

“It was going to be nirvana,” Kulig said. “If it is in good shape you can redevelop it. If it is in rough shape like ours, it is bad, and you hope someone comes in who can do something with it.”

In some ways, Russell is lucky since the mills are privately owned. Many are abandoned and end up in the hands of cities and towns, which struggle to keep them safe while they search for permanent reuse options.

“It is a huge financial undertaking, and small towns do not have the resources to fix them. It takes a lot of money and time and effort,” said Janko Tomasic, town planner for Dalton who wrote a paper on mill redevelopment while earning his master’s degree at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Tomasic said he is the only person in his department and has little time to handle long-term projects on top of day-to-day responsibilities. Small towns are also at a disadvantage when trying to compete for a relatively small pool of brownfield improvement funds because they rarely have dedicated grant writers.

Redevelopment is difficult, and there are no real magic bullets, said Tomasic who added he learned this while working with the owner of a small Main Street garage to redevelop the property, a project that eventually fizzled.

It is also difficult to attract investors, especially in rural communities, because most cannot see how to make a profit from a huge building located a distance from a population center, Tomasic said.

“It is a two-fold problem. They cause general blight, and it sends a message that jobs have left the community,” he said. “They were economic drivers of the community in the past. Why can’t they be an economic driver now?”

Fire

Russell isn’t the only community that has seen a mill burn, threatening nearby neighborhoods. In Holyoke, the about 300,000-square-foot Parsons Paper Mill burned down in a fire in 2008, and Mt. Tom Paper Mill was destroyed in 2012.

A 2022 fire in Orange spread to a total of five vacant properties. Two of the three fires were set by youths and one was accidental.

The longer they are vacant, the more dangerous they become, said Laurence Brandoli, a retired Springfield firefighter who is now a professor of fire science technology at Springfield Technical Community College.

“They put firefighters at a tremendous risk and the whole community is at risk,” Brandoli said.

The buildings typically have no electrical service. But even if the building is well secured, trespassers still sneak in and can start fires to keep warm or cook. Others set them on fire on purpose, he said.

Because there are rarely any working sprinklers in an abandoned building, once a fire starts, it can burn for some time without being detected, and once firefighters are alerted, it is out of control, Brandoli said.

“A fire doubles in size every minute and it can burn some before it is noticed,” he said.

It is dangerous for firefighters to enter a building, Brandoli said. People steal copper and metal pipes, which can cause gas leaks. Floors and walls could be deteriorated and unstable. There could be holes in the floor that are difficult to see in smokey conditions, and unknown chemicals can be anywhere in the building.

Some even deliberately sabotage the building and set traps to purposely injure firefighters, he said.

The buildings are huge and can be a labyrinth, making it easy for firefighters to get lost in the dark and smoke, which happened in the 1999 Worcester Cold Storage fire that killed six firefighters, he said.

On Monday, a blaze in a Chelsea mill that had been abandoned since 2009 took firefighters from 20 different communities eight hours to bring under control. Four nearby schools were forced to close for the day and MBTA service that ran nearby had to be suspended for hours.

As was the case in many mills that have absent landlords often located in other states, the city had been pushing them to secure it for years, news reports said.

Owning the project

In Springfield, officials went to court twice in four months to force Vibra Healthcare to better secure the hospital they closed on State Street a year ago. Owners argued they have repeatedly boarded lower windows and doors but people continually rip them off to gain access.

Four days after a judge ordered the company to pay for a 24-hour security guard to conduct a fire watch, a group of youths broke into the building and set at least 10 small fires on multiple floors. The October fires were extinguished quickly and caused little damage.

Vibra is a good example of a burden the city hopes to turn into an opportunity. The company has agreed to turn the building and the 17.5 acres of prime land that it sits on over to Springfield to be redeveloped, but talks have stalled, said Timothy Sheehan, economic development director for Springfield.

“The bottom line is so many of these old buildings are really beautiful and you don’t want to get to the point where you get to demolition,” Sheehan said. “The other issue is, if you have real development, it takes time. They don’t take 18 months, it takes years and years.”

There are old industrial buildings in various states of disrepair throughout Springfield and examples of successful redevelopment projects such as the new affordable housing complex for first-time homebuyers built off Morris Street at the sight of the Gemini Corp. textile mill, which was abandoned in 1989 and destroyed by fire in 2003.

One of the difficulties of dealing with vacant industrial buildings is getting owners to take responsibility for the vacant buildings. Some have declared bankruptcy and some simply can’t be found, leaving cities with a legal quagmire they have to sort through in order to take control of a property they don’t even want, Sheehan said.

One of Springfield’s most complicated was the former Massachusetts Career Development Institution on Wilbraham Road. The 2.5-acre property housed a nonprofit job-training center that closed in 2013 after being the subject of a federal corruption investigation. One arson fire destroyed a section of the complex in 2016, and several others five years later turned the building into what Mayor Domenic J. Sarno called a “death trap.”

“Getting control of MCDI was extremely difficult. The entity was no longer in existence and there were charges on the title,” Sheehan said.

The city finally was able to tear it down in 2021 after more than five years of legal wrangling, he said.

Redevelopments are possible even with the most troubled properties if a developer with the patience and financing expertise is interested, he said.

Sheehan pointed to the once-derelict Knox Automobile building on Wilbraham Road that had been vacant for decades and the city took for tax title in 2009.

Developer Gordon Pulsifer, owner of First Resource Development Corp., had just finished converting the vacant Indian Motorcycle building into a 199-apartment complex when he told city officials it was time to do something with the Knox building.

The city had tried multiple times to find a developer interested in doing something with the building to no avail so it welcomed Pulsifer’s interest.

“The building was so badly deteriorated the building inspector would let us in at first,” he said. Eventually, the inspector allowed Pulsifer to enter part of it and they surveyed the rest with a drone.

It took years and a tremendous amount of money to get to the 2024 ribbon cutting for the 96-unit affordable housing apartment building.

“The other issue is the cost. The Knox building cost half a million dollars per unit,” Sheehan said. “He bundled (state affordable housing) tax credits with historic tax credits and drove a redevelopment budget into the black as opposed to being in the red.”

Those two projects with their nearly 300 apartments are rebuilding a neighborhood. The city invested in some infrastructure improvements to make the streets more walkable, and now it is seeing small businesses filling in vacant storefronts to serve residents, he said.

Properties in waiting

Holyoke has one of the largest numbers of vacant mills across the small city.

Aaron Vega, director of planning and community development for Holyoke, estimates there is between 700,000 and 1 million square feet of available industrial space with a lot of it divided between a half-dozen buildings.

“It is really choose your own adventure. Every one of these mills has a backstory and might be empty but not completely empty and some may have been vacant for 10, 20 years,” Vega said.

Mills in Gateway Cities like Lawrence and Lowell have seen a rebirth, but they are fueled by the Boston economic engine and rents can be double those in Western Massachusetts, Vega said.

About two years ago, brothers Denis and Marco Luzuriaga renovated what is now called the Cubit Coworks building on Race Street. They now help others interested in doing the same.

Vega said their project, which has businesses and apartments on the second floor, has been moderately successful, but they are local residents who are motivated to improve the community.

“It is not for the faint of heart. They are massive projects, there are environmental issues and they need tax credits and other funding,” Vega said. “They can’t be just handled by a house flipper. You need a big firm with a lot of experience.”

He used the example of Winn Development’s project to turn the long-closed Farr-Alpaca Mills at 216 Appleton St. into an age 55 and over apartment building.

“It has taken eight years and they have 11 different funding mechanisms,” Vega said.

At one point, it looked like Holyoke’s solution to redeveloping some of its vacant mills was in the legalization of marijuana, or what Vega calls “the green bubble.”

“In the ‘70s and ‘80s, big outside investors came in and overpaid for properties and they didn’t do anything with them. We are in the same place with cannabis,” he said.

Truelieve, for example, purchased a 126,000-square-foot, 155-year-old mill on Canal Street, which it operated for a few years before closing in 2023. It invested $40 million into the decaying structure that is vacant again.

Vega said he has asked owners to donate the building to the city with the idea of putting it on the market to build a new local economy in indoor farming.

“Right now, we have a dozen properties bought by cannabis companies and the price declined so they aren’t using them,” he said. “I’m guessing they use them as a tax write-off.”

Now Vega worries owners don’t want to improve the buildings because their taxes will increase, so they will erode further and need even more work.

Vega said he is putting some of his hope into the $5 billion housing bond bill passed this summer, saying if some of that money comes to Western Massachusetts, it could save some of the vacant mills.

Making it work

Westmass Development Corp., which was known for building and managing industrial parks, expanded into the mill development business in 2011 when it bought the 170-acre Ludlow Mills Complex with its 1.4 million square feet of space.

The mill had one tenant — a landscaping company. Now it is a growing mixed-use development that just witnessed the completion of the $43 million reconstruction of historic Mill 8 into 95 mixed-income apartments for those age 55 and older.

“This is one of the things I’m most proud of doing,” said Jeffrey Daley, Westmass’ CEO and president. “I always say it was a landscaping storage building and we turned the corner in five short years and we restored it into a community setting.”

While Westmass continues its work to continue the Ludlow Mills development, the company has used its expertise and is helping communities such as Monson and Warren find solutions for their vacant mills.

“It is challenging. A lot of larger mill buildings are so large in size they don’t pencil out (to make a profit),” Daley said. “Bringing a building back up to building and safety codes alone is a significant investment, and there are not a lot of public or private investors who want to do that.”

Before even getting started, a developer must decide if there is a viable market for the project. For Ludlow Mills, that answer was to combine housing, retail and commercial uses to create its own community, said Sean O’Donnell, Westmass community development and planning coordinator.

It takes a unique developer with deep pockets, since it may take years to make a profit — even with grants and tax credits, he said.

One way Westmass is making the Ludlow Mills project a success is to do the work in phases so the campus generates money as soon as possible. That means evaluating which buildings are redeveloped and which ones are razed and replaced, O’Donnell said.

It is vital to get a vacant building occupied as soon as possible.

Many of these buildings have leaking roofs and multiple broken windows, and some have sat like that for 40-50 years. A lot of the mills were built in the 1880s and are taking beatings from the weather, O’Donnell said.

“You have to have people in these buildings. You need the air conditioning on, you need the windows opening and closing,” O’Donnell said. “Every day that goes by, every storm that happens the building deteriorates.”

But Ludlow Mills is an example that the mills can be reclaimed and no longer be a safety concern. As there is less and less available open space for development, O’Donnell said he believes more people are turning to mill redevelopment as the solution to finding space for businesses and housing.

“Western Mass. has so much to offer based on the inventory if people look at them differently,” Daley said.

Plus, a lot of communities do not want to see the buildings lost.

“Speaking from a historical perspective a lot of people want them to be redeveloped and rebirthed, and the other half does not want to see them decay and become a liability,” O’Donnell said.

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