Cable Mills to get new life

The Berkshire Eagle

July 4, 2007
Section: Headlines

Cable Mills to get new life
By Jessica Willis, Berkshire Eagle Staff

Wednesday, July 04 WILLIAMSTOWN —

Cable Mills, meet your new owner. The development has had its share of "fits and starts," according to Mitchell Properties project manager Stephen Neill, but the Cable Mills building on Water Street is finally on its way to its incarnation as a 61-unit condominium project.

The 90,000-square-foot property was officially sold to Mitchell Properties at the end of June for $3 million, and the transaction effectively put an end to the uncertainty surrounding the project's fate.

Robert H. Kuehn Jr., the original developer, suffered a heart attack and died in June 2006.
In 2003, Kuehn's company, the Cambridge-based Keen Development Corp., purchased the 130-year-old property from General Cable Industries for about $400,000, Neill said. He added that Keen, along with Berkshire Housing Development Corp. in Pittsfield, did a significant amount of demolition work at the site in 2005 and 2006, before Kuehn's death.

"They made some good headway," Neill said, noting that, when Kuehn purchased the rambling industrial property — which has been everything from a bleaching and dyeing facility to a twine manufacturer — it was suffering from "environmental issues" that have since been addressed.
The interior — which Neill says is "very wide open" and doesn't have columns supporting its soaring Douglas fir ceilings — was sandblasted and gutted in the initial process. The brick exterior was cleaned and preserved with baking soda in the fall of 2005.

Originally, the project called for 83 units, spread through the original three buildings and a series of "low-lying and nondescript" structures at the rear of the site; Neill said many were built long after the site was founded in 1873.

"Many of them couldn't, or wouldn't, be saved," Neill said, adding that close to 100,000 square feet of "sprawl" has been demolished.

He has firsthand knowledge of the ups and downs in the Cable Mills saga; before taking a project management position at the Boston-based Mitchell Properties at the beginning of 2007, he was a project manager at Keen, where he was introduced to the property.

"It'll be nice to see something get started," he said.

Later in the summer, Neill said, crews will undertake the "unglamorous" job of stabilizing the property and protecting it from further deterioration.

"We have to button up the buildings for the upcoming winter," he said. Although the buildings look a little "ratty" — the windows have been taken out — the property is in "very good shape overall," he added.

Construction will begin in earnest in the spring, he said, and Cable Mills should be ready for its occupants in the spring of 2008.

Costs being finalized
At this point, the price of a unit and the total construction cost are still being finalized, he said. Mitchell Properties, which is doing business as 160 Water LLC, is still in the permitting process with Williamstown, he added.

Of Cable Mills' 61 units, 12 will be designated for affordable housing, Neill said; Kuehn's plan called for a total of 64 units over the nine-acre site.

The smaller, two-story buildings will contain the town homes, and the main mill building, which has four floors, will contain one-, two- and three-bedroom units.

Designing river walk
Mitchell Properties also will be responsible for the design of the publicly accessible river walk that will follow along the banks of the Green River at the rear of the property.

There also have been "tweaks" made to the design of the parking lot, but for the most part, Kuehn's vision for the property will endure, Neill said.

He also noted that Bart Mitchell, the president of Mitchell Properties, is a trustee of Williams College and is "very connected" to the area.