CategoriesGeneral News

Sold out: Every available parcel in this once-vacant Massachusetts industrial park has been purchased

WORCESTER — A project 22 years, six months and some days in the making, the city of Worcester has finally sold all of the parcels available in what was once a South Worcester industrial wasteland.

“SWIP is done,” City Manager Edward Augustus Jr. said.

Chacharone Properties, Advanced Machinery and Table Talk Pies have finalized deals to develop six parcels of land equivalent to about 95,000 square feet of new construction. The entire South Worcester Industrial Park is more than 200,000 square feet of land.

James Chacharone, president of Chacharone Properties, announced at a groundbreaking for Table Talk Pies that he wants to construct a manufacturing building about 7,500 square feet on spec which he hopes to fill with an industrial tenant. Chacharone’s purchase was the last remaining parcel in the industrial park area.

Chacharone’s company is also building Table Talk Pies’ new, 50,000 square foot manufacturing plant, which will open in approximately six months.

“There’s a great need for manufacturing in Worcester,” Chacharone said. “I saw there was a lack of industrial manufacturing in the city.”

Worcester is in the midst of a renaissance of development, dining and culture in the city, but industry and manufacturing are areas that have continued to be slow to catch up.

Local businessman Steve Rothschild will be building a high-tech manufacturing plant across from the Table Talk Pies factory, according to Peter Dunn, business programs manager with the city’s Executive Office of Economic Development.

The building will house high-tech business incubators that will also have access to loading docks to manufacture and ship equipment. With the ability to design and manufacturer in the same space locally, Dunn hopes those smaller, high-tech businesses will stay in Worcester.

Next door to that, Absolute Machinery, which refurbishes expensive machines, will be expanding it’s building on a nearby parcel.

Augustus hopes the six empty parcels that once made up South Worcester’s industrial wasteland will be developed into a vibrant industrial park.

“(The industrial park tenants) could be small electronics or medical device manufacturers. We’re willing to look at any tenant that wants to come in. We want it to be diverse,” Augustus said.

Augustus still remembers when the industrial park was just abandoned, city-owned property dotted with old, useless mill buildings and overgrown grass. Now, it could be job producing, taxable property.

“I remember that it was an abandoned lot that did nothing for the city,” Augustus said. “But we’ve still got a lot of work to do.”

 

MassLive.com

CategoriesProperty Update

Table Talk breaks ground on 1-million-pies-per-week facility

Table Talk Pies broke ground on a new manufacturing site in Worcester that will produce 1 million pies a week once it comes online.

The groundbreaking took place at the South Worcester Industrial Park on Thursday morning and was attended by numerous city officials, representatives of Table Talk as well as James Chacharone, founder of Worcester-based Chacharone Properties that is developing the site.

The Table Talk project covers the construction of a 50,000-square-foot modern industrial building set to be completed in approximately six months. The site will bring 30 jobs from the company’s existing facility on Water Street and create an additional 50 full-time jobs.

Table Talk Pies is a family business that was established in 1924. Harry Kokkinis, president of Table Talk Pies, said that the company spent four months looking for a proper site for the expanded manufacturing capacity and could not find an existing structure in Worcester.

The property’s construction is being handled by RP Masiello Inc. of Boylston, which has worked on eight other projects with Chacharone Properties.