Young visionaries, veteran developer take on Bates Mill No. 5

Lewiston city officials started the year resolved to bring on the wrecking ball and finally tear down the vacant Bates Mill No. 5. For 20 years, they had been spending hundreds of thousands of dollars annually to keep the two-story mill viable for redevelopment that remained elusive. It was time to tear it down, even if it meant spending an estimated $2.5 million to do so.

But in the 11th hour, a grassroots group led by architect Gabrielle Russell, called Grow L+A, won a six-month reprieve for Mill No. 5. In a 4-3 vote, city councilors in April gave the group a last-ditch chance to create a redevelopment plan for the building. Its success in identifying prospective tenants for the redeveloped mill prompted Auburn architect-developer Tom Platz to take a closer look.

It was a key connection. Platz had already revitalized the Bates Mill Complex's eight other buildings, earning acclaim in the New England Real Estate Journal and from Lewiston's Historic Preservation Board for his work. At a decisive Oct. 1 city council meeting, he told councilors that Bates Mill No. 5 was worth saving — and he was the guy to do it.

Councilors unanimously agreed to let him try.

Right plan, right timing

“Perhaps the biggest difference this time around is the groundwork Grow L+A did these past six months,” Platz says, citing the group's lineup of prospective tenants who were enthusiastic about the building's potential. “There's interest there that wasn't there before.”

Grow L+A's vision of the mill centers on a mixed-use development anchored by a server farm on the lower floor and food hub above it. Platz says what impressed him about the plan is how those two uses are uniquely suited to the expansive floor plan of Mill No. 5. Other mill buildings have “very dense column” patterns, he says, but Mill No. 5's columns are few and far between.

“Some of the users we're talking about now couldn't go into the spaces available in the older mills,” he says. “They need bigger, unobstructed rooms.”

Another difference is the success Bates Mill LLC — the company Platz and others set up to oversee the complex's redevelopment in 1996 — has had in reviving the sprawling industrial complex. Fifteen years ago, barely 100 people worked there. Now, Platz says, it's just under 2,000. Tenants include TD Bank, Maine Community Health Options, Baxter Brewing Co., DaVinci's and Fish Bones American Grill restaurants, and The Lofts apartment complex in Mill No. 2.

“Certainly, any business thinking about moving [into a redeveloped mill] likes to look at your past successes before they take the leap,” he says. “The businesses who are now looking at Mill No. 5 are confident we have the ability to do it.”

Platz says he is negotiating an option to buy Mill No. 5 with city staff, which he hopes to accomplish within six months. Simultaneously, he's talking with prospective tenants about signing commitments to lease space.

“We need both,” he says. “We have some prospective tenants who'd like to be in the building within the next 30 months. We're talking to retail, potential office users, some light manufacturing … it's a full gamut.”

Agent of change

Since 1992, when Bates Manufacturing gave the keys to its sprawling mill complex to the city in lieu of its unpaid taxes, the odd-shaped building with the saw-toothed roof has been the toughest to redevelop. While Platz and his business partners steadily transformed the eight other Bates Mill buildings into a vibrant mixed-use complex, Mill No. 5 languished.

Various redevelopment proposals had been floated over the years, most of them singling out a convention center as its best use. In 2010, it was briefly eyed as a site for a casino. Lewiston voters backed that idea in a local referendum, but voters statewide rejected it in a referendum held that November.

Mill No. 5's future, once again, was accompanied by a question mark.

Allan Turgeon, property manager of the Bates Mill Complex, credits local architect Russell, president of Grow L+A, for putting together a focused and grassroots effort to save Mill No. 5 from the wrecking ball. The group includes local business owners, students and area residents.

“Gabby has a tremendous amount of energy,” he says. “On the outside, she's calm and collected. But she has that inner passion … That's what it took to save this building.”

A hint of that passion comes through in a TEDxDirigo talk Russell delivered at Bates College in October 2012.

“I believe we have the power to effect change by envisioning as reality the outcome we want to see [happen],” Russell said. She connected her vision for Bates Mill No. 5 to the dreams of her relatives who moved to Lewiston-Auburn from Canada, attracted by the prospect of steady work at Bates Manufacturing's textile mills. When her grandparents worked in Mill No. 5 — her grandfather as a punch card cutter who made the complex series of cards that guided the fabric design of the bedspreads made in the mill — its 500 Jacquard looms produced bedspreads sold throughout the world. At its peak in the 1950s, Bates Manufacturing employed more than 5,000 people.

“This building is symbolic of Lewiston-Auburn's innovative and historic past — and potential future,” she said in the presentation.

But as someone who grew up in Auburn, she also remembers the 1980s as a time of slow but steady decline for Bates Manufacturing. The mill complex was a “depressing landscape,” she said, and L-A became for her, and many of her peers, a place where “nothing was happening” … a place to escape. In her case, that meant going to college at Tulane University in New Orleans, where she earned her bachelor's and master's degrees in architecture.

When she returned to Maine after graduation, it was with a newfound appreciation of Mill No. 5's innovative construction and design by Albert Kahn, one of the foremost American industrial architects of the early 20th century. The hundreds of windows in the mill's saw-toothed roof provided natural light and open ventilation for the loom workers below. Built in 1912-13, it was one of the first buildings in Maine constructed with reinforced concrete and its location at the head of the adjacent canal allowed hydroelectric generators to tap the power of flowing water to run the looms.

In an interview, Russell says the same qualities that had made Mill No. 5 a successful textile factory for much of 20th century, make it an ideal hub for L-A's future economy. But the clock was ticking: failure of the 2010 casino plan put demolishing the building back on the table. If the different reality she envisioned for Mill No. 5 was to happen, Russell says she knew she needed allies willing to do the real work of getting the city to give the mill's redevelopment another chance.

Grow L+A

The hometown newspaper, the Sun Journal, played a key role in that process by inviting readers in the fall of 2011 to share their visions for Mill No. 5. Rhode Island architect James Mangrum submitted his idea that the first floor could be turned into a computer server farm. Heat from its computers then could be used by a hydroponic farm on the floor above. Russell saw a kindred spirit in those concepts and, through the newspaper, got in touch with Mangrum.

“James' vision for the building was so incredibly inspiring,” she says. “I thought, 'Why can't this happen?' I started looking into the pros and cons of it. I thought of all the demolition waste that would go into our landfill if Mill No. 5 was demolished. I thought about how this building is such a big piece of our community's history … It just needed a little love.”

Bates College played a role, too. In the fall of 2012, Russell says, upwards of 40 environmental studies students took on Mill No. 5 as a project. Breaking into small groups, the students drilled into the nitty-gritty details of how much electricity it would take to run a server farm and how much natural light would be needed to grow lettuce.

“They were very engaged,” Russell says. “It was very exciting to work with them.”

At the same time, Russell contacted Kahn Architecture & Design firm and learned she could purchase Albert Kahn's original drawings of Mill No. 5. “For less than $500 I had 16 beautiful drawings,” she says.

She showed them to Mary Callahan, who arranged to have them exhibited at Kimball Street Studios on Lisbon Street. The beauty of Kahn's original drawings, the coincidental 100th anniversary of Mill No. 5's groundbreaking and the building's historic ties to many local families created a buzz around the exhibit.

“People got caught up in the excitement,” Callahan recalls, describing how the drawings helped inspire conversations about Mill No. 5's future. Out of that excitement and energy emerged Grow L+A and its server/food project called Five-2-Farm. The group's vision from the start was to be a catalyst for sustainable and socially responsible development in Lewiston and Auburn.

“I wasn't sure I wanted to save one mill and that was it,” says Peter Flanders, who brings to his role as Grow L+A's vice president negotiation skills honed in his work as sales operations manager for Lee Auto Sales, as well as real estate development skills from his sideline company, Great Falls Development Group. “I asked a simple question, 'If we succeed with this project would you do more?'”

The group said “yes” and began building a business case to bring to the city council. Councilors had signaled at the start of its budget deliberations that Mill No. 5 — barring a miracle — was likely to be demolished by the end of 2013.

The city pivots

Lincoln Jeffers, the city's economic and community development director, says the council's April vote was more a “stay of demolition” than an endorsement of Grow L+A's plans. Councilors gave the group several deadlines and benchmarks, including an economic pro forma with detailed redevelopment cost estimates and a strategic business plan. Three months later, the group delivered a binder that Jeffers says exceeded the city's expectations and gave the group a green light to continue its efforts.

Flanders says by this point the group had gained an ally in Coastal Enterprises Inc.'s Daniel Wallace, program developer for the Wiscasset nonprofit's Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems Program. The program has been working statewide to create food hubs to help Maine farmers more easily reach local customers.

Grow L+A also picked up a grant from the Sewall Foundation to study the feasibility of locating a food co-op at the mill. Other ideas included establishing a health/wellness center and an incubator for food producers.

“It's what helped us make this a multi-use project, unlike the previous efforts that focused primarily on one use,” says Flanders. “Now you could see it develop into something that benefited the whole community.”

Platz agrees, crediting Grow L+A with giving him solid leads on potential tenants. His original goal in redeveloping the mill complex was to eventually replace the 6,000 jobs that were lost during Bates Manufacturing's decline. He's roughly a third of the way there.

“I think what they pulled off is extraordinary,” he says. “They're really dedicated. They did a lot of work to make this happen. I'm not shocked. It's what sets L-A apart, I think. It's not just about the citizens' group either. It's about the city and how all along they've been looking at this mill complex and figuring out 'How can this work?'”