Shuttered Factory Gets Luckey

Inside a Mill River factory where workers once made parts for jet engines, a new crew is designing and building bean-stalk and leaf-petal-designed children’s climbing sculptures to ship to California and the Middle East.

Earlier this spring, the local climbing-sculpture manufacturer Luckey Climbers moved into the 29,000-square-foot office and warehouse building at 300 East St.

A company created by Luckey Climbers President Spencer Luckey and Director of Operations Dana Peterson purchased the building in Dec. 2017 from Space-Craft Manufacturing as the latter, which makes precision engine parts for military and commercial jets, prepared to move its operations from New Haven to Meriden.

“This is just a much, much, much better situation for us,” Luckey said during an interview and tour this week of his business’s new digs.

Founded in Branford in 1984 by Luckey’s late father Tom, Luckey Climbers creates bright, sinuous, one-of-a-kind playgrounds primarily for children’s museums, malls, and other private institutions, including at the Boston Children’s Museum and at the Children’s Museum of Houston.

Luckey Climbers has only one sculpture in all of Connecticut, and it’s located at Foote School on Prospect Hill. Luckey said his business doesn’t have any current plans to build any other sculptures in the Elm City (beyond a potential museum piece, discussed below).

The climbing structures are composed of steel pipes, cable mesh, and wood or plastic platforms, depending on whether they’re intended for inside or outside use.

The younger Luckey moved the business to a roughly 5,000-square-foot manufacturing space at 281 Chapel St. in 2006. The company then upgraded several years later to a roughly 12,000-square foot space at Chapel Street and Blatchley Avenue.

It outgrew that space; hence the purchase the 29,000-square-foot office and industrial building on East Street, where Luckey, Peterson, and their 20 employees design, build, package, and ship their bespoke playgrounds.

Luckey said that the company’s previous Chapel Street manufacturing site had enough space for his team to work on only one project at a time.

Surveying the cavernous East Street warehouse, equipped with four separate gantries and a loading dock that allows trucks to drop off materials directly on site, Luckey said that his welders and pipecutters and designers can now work on three projects at once.

“From a logistical, practical level,” Luckey said, ​“this is way easier to deal with.”

In one corner of the warehouse, one of Luckey’s designers was cutting pipes for a sculpture to be sent to a shopping mall in Carlsbad, California. In another corner, an employee was fitting pipes in a lime-green sculpture to be sent to a shopping mall in the affluent Porter Ranch neighborhood of Los Angeles.

Tucked away at the back of the warehouse, yet another employee was putting the final touches on a prototype for the international chain of family entertainment centers, Chuck E. Cheese’s.

Another section of the warehouse contains shelves stacked high with wavy wooden platforms, which consist of thin sheets of pliable wood that are glued together and molded into form in vacuum bags.

Usually, Luckey said, his team ships the steel frame superstructure of the jungle gym to a client, and then sends out a team of employees to unpack, attach the platforms and mesh wiring, and install. He said the projects can take anywhere between a few months and a few years to complete, depending on the client, and that they can range from 20 feet tall to much, much bigger.

“Last winter, we put out four in our old space,” Luckey said about his company’s jungle gym-output before its move to East Street. ​“But it was a mess and dangerous. To do one thing, you had to move a bunch of other stuff. We don’t have that problem anymore.”

He said the company is on track to finish 13 climbing sculptures by the end of 2018. He’s also working on new climbing structures for a children’s museum in Qatar, the Valley Fair mall in San Jose and the San Diego Zoo.

“We moved here,” he said, ​“and then all of a sudden, there was this huge push of work that just magically came together. If we had to negotiate in the old space, it would have been really difficult.”

Luckey Climbers’ purchase of 300 East St. also included a small, two-story office building immediately adjacent to the warehouse site.

Luckey said he hopes to build out a Luckey Museum in the space, complete with its own two-story Luckey Climbers sculpture.

He said he also wants the future museum to showcase some of his dad’s architectural artifacts, include miniature wooden carousel models, chairs, boats, and lots and lots of climbing sculpture designs.

“This will be an ongoing project that will hopefully take many, many years,” he said about the museum, ​“and grow incrementally over time.”