Great Barrington — A “minor” pollution issue at the Bridge Street site of a former dry cleaning business won’t interfere with plans for a new $15 million retail, office and condominium development that will include an expanded Berkshire Co-op Market, according to the developer and property owner.
Benchmark Development principal Michael Charles said his company is working with “respected” Springfield-based environmental testing and engineering firm O’Reilly, Talbot and Oken Associates (OTO) to assess and remediate the site contaminated with perchloroethylene, a dry cleaning chemical “incidental to doing business.”
The building is to be torn down to make way for a 14,500 square foot building that will feature the expanded Co-op Market as an anchor retail store with office and market-rate apartments above it. The existing Co-op building will be razed for a parking area and, behind it, another apartment building will go up.
Charles said a “small amount” of the chemical was detected during Phase II of Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection’s (MassDEP) assessment that involved drilling borings into the ground for monitoring wells. OTO, he said is following all MassDEP “protocol.”
The chemicals, which are a known carcinogen and hormone disrupter, “are isolated to a small area in the building,” Charles said, adding that they were not found in the groundwater.
“We don’t consider it a big issue,” he added.
While Charles did not say how much the remediation would cost, he said any such cost “is part of the development process” and “not surprising” in a downtown building with former “industrial uses.”
The building is under contract with Irving Realty Trust, and the closing is contingent on all permits, Charles said, adding that the closing date will be 30 days after the town’s special permit is issued. Benchmark has already begun working its way through the permitting process, and brought conceptual plans to a town Planning Board meeting last week.
Building owner Irving Cosburg, who was born and raised in Great Barrington, told the Edge that his family started Leonard’s Cleaners on Railroad Street and had owned several buildings there. Leonard’s eventually moved to the Bridge Street location and, years later, rented it out to Laramee’s Cleaners which, several years ago, moved to Stockbridge Road.
Cosburg, who lives in Florida now, said that, out of “16 borings,” there was one “hot spot, 1.5 feet below the cement slab.” In the case of this contamination, there was likely an accidental “spill” of the chemicals in one area, he said.
Many former dry cleaning sites, however, are plagued with severe contamination that seeps into groundwater and possibly even down into bedrock. In Pittsfield, a building inspection turned up dry cleaning chemicals blocks away from the former Stetson Cleaners at 35-41 Federal St. in back of City Hall. At the former Ried Cleaners on Main Street in Great Barrington, the chemicals seeped into groundwater and possibly bedrock, creating a plume that has affected at least a few nearby buildings, and is running south and east toward the Housatonic River.
