Lee — After over 10 years of planning, there might finally be a light at the end of the tunnel of the long-in-the-works Eagle Mill Redevelopment Project. The redevelopment plans call for the Eagle Mill building, which was built in 1808, to be redeveloped into affordable housing units.
Located on West Center Street, the building was formerly a paper mill and sits on 8.4 acres of land on both sides of the Housatonic River. It was fully operational as a paper mill, owned by Schweitzer-Mauduit of Ancram, N.Y., up until 2008 when it was shut down and abandoned.
Seven residential houses on West Center Street are near the property on West Center Street, along with the Mill. Back in December 2017, Eagle Mill Redevelopment LLC, which is a partnership of Mill Renaissance LLC of Great Barrington and DEW Properties of Williston, Vt., acquired the property. The company also, over time, purchased the seven houses on West Center Street. “It took many years to figure out what to do with this property,” Developer Jeffrey Cohen told The Berkshire Edge. “It’s one thing to buy a property, but it’s another thing to say, ‘What do I do with this?’ And another issue is to go to the town and say, ‘What do you want? Can we have a common interest?’ We did all of that, but it took a lot of communication over the years.”
Eventually, the company decided upon creating affordable housing units. “It’s the only type of real estate development that is financeable as far as I’m concerned, especially in the Berkshires,” Cohen said. “There’s no market for new office space, and there’s no market for new retail space, if at all. There are a lot of people out there who are anxious about affordable housing. There is an ability to finance affordable housing projects with the state, and that means the ability to declare some of the building as historic and get historic tax credits. We can get money to build it, which is not easy, but we did get it.” Over time, the project has received nearly $25 million in financing, of which approximately $10.5 has come from state and historic tax credits.
Back in early July, phase one of the redevelopment project started, which includes abatement work on some portions of the building.
Cohen gave The Berkshire Edge a tour of the building on July 14. Remnants of its former use as a paper mill from over 15 years ago were still in the building, including old machines and other scattered artifacts.
Cohen said that, while the interior clearly needed considerable work when The Edge toured it, he fully expects that phase one of the project will be completed within 18 months and will include 50 to 56 affordable housing apartments. He said that phase two of the project would include the construction of two new apartment buildings, while phase three of the redevelopment plans includes the further construction of housing units across the street from the Eagle Mill building, with a total of at least 135 new housing units being built as part of the redevelopment plans, along with the possibility of retail shops.
As the beginning of phase one continued to move forward on Monday, July 24, the company held an event at Eagle Mill that included the beginning of the demolition of the seven houses on West Center Street.
“To me, this is an historic day because there has not been a day that has gone by when someone in town says to me, ‘When are you going to tear down these houses?’” Cohen said at the event. “This day is historic and important for [the project’s] credibility. The one thing I want everybody to understand is, in order for us to have gotten where we are today, it takes more than a village. It takes a lot of people working very hard all the time to go through a process that takes years.”
“This is a very significant day where we’re about to move into the future,” Lee First Selectman Bob Jones said at the event. “This development is going to change the way [the town] is perceived and is going to make a lot of people’s lives better. The whole end of this town is going to be transformed, and it’s very exciting. But I would be remiss if we didn’t stop and remember all the lives that have gone through these houses and through these mills. There are centuries of collective memories here.”
In his speech, State Rep. William “Smitty” Pignatelli (D – Lenox) said he is thankful for the community support for the project. “The community really embraced this project,” Pignatelli said. “From day one, the input from this community was pretty special. There were really no conflicts or disagreements about what this project was going to be about. And because of you, this project is going to take shape based on what Lee wanted to have.”
