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Date: 11/20/2023
LUDLOW – State Sen. Jake Oliveira (D-Ludlow) and state Rep. Aaron Saunders (D-Belchertown) announced that Ludlow has been awarded two One Stop for Growth Grant Awards for the fiscal year 2024.
The grants total $805,500 for various needs and projects.
The grants both fall under the Underutilized Properties criteria of the One Stop for Growth Grant Awards and include $500,000 for the Ludlow Mills Clock Tower renovation and $300,500 for capital improvements to Stockhouse #119.
The Underutilized Property grant funds will enable the restoration of the dilapidated and non-operational Ludlow Clock Tower at Mill 8.
The scope of the Clock Tower restoration was excluded from the redevelopment of the Mill 8 development budget due to cost constraints.
The scope of the restoration will include abatement, sandblasting, select demolition, interior and exterior facade repair, roofing repair, structural stabilization, MEP replacement, fire protection, LED lighting panels and clock repair.
WinnDevelopment Vice President Dana Angelo said, “We pursued this grant to make sure we could fully restore the historic clock in the iconic tower at Mill 8. It’s one of the items we are questioned about the most, second only to how to lease a new apartment. It was very clear that the community had a strong desire to see the clock operational again.”
WinnDevelopment expects to complete the restoration of the clock and the tower by the end of the summer 2024.
“I think it’s less about telling time and more important as very visible symbol for the ongoing economic revitalization of this landmark mill complex. Completing this redevelopment should create new jobs and fuel ongoing growth, not just at the mill complex, but downtown as well in terms of generating new customers, businesses and services,” Angelo added.
He added, “This grant award was very welcome news – the icing on the cake, in a way, for this long-anticipated project. We are grateful to MassDevelopment, Senator Oliveira, Representative Saunders, the Town of Ludlow, the Ludlow community and all of our partners for their ongoing support of the Ludlow Mill 8 redevelopment.”
Capital improvements to Stockhouse #119 will provide a prototype for the adaptive reuse of the historic warehouses at the Ludlow Mills into modern, high-tech office space.
Westmass Area Development Vice President of Operations Sarah la Cour added, “Historically these stockhouses are just big open warehouses with big high ceilings and that is all they were. They stored the jute that was manufactured in the mills. Over the years they have been a variety of machine shops or storage.”
A portion of this 6,000-square-foot building was converted to two-story offices and associated commercial amenities but was not built to code and remains structurally unsound and unsafe.
“This particular building, 119, at some point in its more recent history, somebody tried to create two-story offices in it, and it was done very badly and then there was a fire and it was not fixed and made even worse ultimately,” la Cour added.
The grant funds requested will be used to gut out the entire building and renovations to redevelop the space for a more economically viable use.
There are almost 20 more stockhouses located in the Ludlow Mills and la Cour thinks this project can help illustrate how businesses can operate in that area.
She added, “We want to be able to show a prototype of how you can reuse these stockhouses into something completely different. You can get a higher rent; you could get some employees in there whether it’s a lawyer’s office or anything like that.”
La Cour added that the hope is the project takes approximately six months and that once finished it can potentially be replicated in the other stockhouses.
She said, “We are excited to have received this grant. There are still plenty of these buildings and some of which are just huge open spaces that don’t generate much revenue as people use them for storage. If we can show a prototype for how these buildings can be reused for office space, then that increases the economic potential for all the buildings, and it also increases the opportunities for more jobs.”