The streets around the edifice in New Bedford are quiet with the anticipation of new occupants now that most of the demolition and finish work inside the old New Bedford Standard-Times building is complete.
The venerable old building, constructed in 1894 and long home to the South Coast’s largest daily newspaper, has undergone a dramatic transformation that started last April, updating the vacant property for potential new office tenants and a ground-floor restaurant.
Boston developer The Columbus Group purchased the building from Jamochamaz Realty Trust for $650,000 on April 20, 2011, according to information from The Warren Group, publisher of Banker & Tradesman. The firm bought the property through affiliate New Bedford Urban Renaissance LLC with plans for a more than $6 million investment in the 34,000-square-foot building.
The first phase of the rehab project, with a cost of approximately $2.5 million, is finished. Now the building has the updated mechanicals, technology and other prerequisites of the attorneys, insurance companies and other office users the developer expects to attract to second through fifth floors as tenants, said Albert Xuan, Columbus Group’s project manager. Those tenants could move in by the end of March.
Each floor of the five-story building is about 5,000 square feet. Floors two, three and five are essentially identical and broken into offices. The fourth floor has retained an open floor plan.
The old newspaper building has been empty since the Standard-Times moved to more modern offices in 1995. The structure, designed by Boston Custom House Tower architects Peabody & Stearns, is in the Central New Bedford Historic District.
The historical character of the building, thanks to its age and well-known designers, was kept intact as much as possible throughout, said Tom Bigelow, founding principal of Easton-based Bigelow & Fleming construction company, which oversaw the nearly finished first phase of construction.
The property has been stripped to its structural beams, which the project designers decided to leave exposed for aesthetic purposes, giving the place the feel of an old factory with a modern twist.
In Need Of ‘Some Serious Loving Care’
When Bigelow’s construction teams started on the job, the building was clearly showing its 16 years of dormancy, with many exterior windows smashed to pieces, covered with plastic or boarded up with plywood, Bigelow recalled.
“It looked like a building that needed some serious loving care,” he mused in a recent interview. “There were some exterior masonry cornices that needed repair, which were especially interesting because they needed to be custom-fitted. The guy came out to the site, he was a true artist, and he made plastic molds of them. It’s hard to find that kind of masonry work detail nowadays.”
The property also still housed the massive old printing presses in the basement, harkening to bygone days of the newspaper.
“I heard the demo guy had a little trouble removing them,” Bigelow joked, “but those had to come out. As you walk into the basement you’re so surprised by how tall the ceilings are down there, but that’s where the presses were so they had to be.”
There are several interior windows on each level that have been covered over, but are still obviously former windows. Those windows opened into a central air shaft and were thrown open in the summer months to provide ventilation through the property, a throwback to pre-air conditioning building design.
The property is connected to an adjacent condominium building by common doors, providing an emergency egress for condo residents. In 2007, former renovation plans called for the Standard-Times building to be redeveloped into condos, but those plans never came to fruition.
Also on the project renovation team are Steffian Bradley Architects, which designed the renovation, and historic preservation consultants MacRostie Historic Advisors LLC of Washington, D.C., who have been working with the National Park Service to ensure fulfillment of federal tax credit requirements for the project.
Email: jcronin@thewarrengroup.com
