Thomas Breen photos
Wrecking crew at work between Winchester, Mansfield.
An excavator with “Stamford Wrecking” written on its boom worked Friday morning to rip apart wood, brick, and concrete amidst a spray of dust-controlling water — on the first day of demolition of the remaining vacant, toxic former Winchester Repeating Arms factory buildings.
The excavator was one of a handful of vehicles, surrounded and operated by a crew of hard-hatted demolition workers, parked on the former Winchester factory site between Winchester Avenue and Mansfield Street, just north of Munson.
Friday marked day one of the long-awaited abatement and tear-down of a cluster of former factory buildings dubbed Tract A, located right next door to the Winchester Lofts apartments and Winchester Works office space.
The industrial property’s owner, Science Park Development Corporation (SPDC), has contracted Stamford Wrecking to spend the next 12 months knocking down the former factory buildings, which are so contaminated with hazardous chemicals like trichloroethylene (TCE), methylene chloride, and petroleum hydrocarbons that the state Department of Public Health found in 2021 that they could not be safely saved and repurposed.
Instead, SPDC, with co-developers LMXD and Twining Properties, are remediating and removing the structures. Per the terms of a state grant subsidizing the cleanup and demolition, the owners must put up either 100-plus units of housing, at least 20 percent of which must be affordable, or at least 100,000 square feet of life science labs or commercial space by December 2030.
All that lies in the future. The property’s former life — as an around-the-clock mini-city composed of factories with tens of thousands of people turning out Winchester rifles – is also now receding further into the past.
As for the present, Stamford Wrecking and the demolition crew on Friday set to work tearing apart the dilapidated buildings, with plans to work their way clockwise over the next year as they knock down the vacant structures still standing on Mansfield and then on Munson.
Click here, here, and here to read recent articles about the demolition project, and click here for the Winchester Center website, which has more details about the project’s scope, timeline, and purpose.
The view from Mansfield ...
... and from Winchester.
Crunch.
Cruunnnnch.
Meanwhile, just north of the demolition site, construction crews are putting the final touches on 283 new apartments to be called "Winchester Green."