The once downtrodden mill town of North Adams, MA, keeps attracting interest as former factory space is repurposed.
The biggest rejuvenation project has been MassMOCA, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (seen above). But small steps are in the works as well. For example, the Berkshire Mountains region is getting another microbrewery in the form of the Cold River Brewing Co.
The facility will only make beer, unlike the nearby Barrington Brewery and Pittsfield Brew Works which also operate restaurants on site. Cold River will produce craft beers, made with 100% barley or wheat malt. Plans call for initial production two days a week during its first year, with a 7,500-barrel output.
Christopher Post, of Becket, MA, and partners Allan Duvall, Chris Cuzme and Alex Hall, all of New York City, submitted the application for a 15-barrel microbrewery to be located in a 4,000-square-foot space once occupied by the Delftree Mushroom Factory's sanitation and packaging facility. Their proposal is scheduled to go before the city planning board on March 12.
Post, a native of the United Kingdom who was an investment banker, became a brewmaster in 2005 and worked at the Chelsea Brewing Co. in Manhattan and the Greenpoint Beer Works in Brooklyn, where Duvall was the brewmaster.
MassMOCA bills itself as "one of the largest cultural institutions in the country" with more than 300,000 square feet of developed space and another 300,000 of "mothballed" space, in 26 buildings on 13 acres. It mounts five exhibitions a year and presents morew than 80 major performing arts events.
North Adams, which was the birthplace of famous suffragette Susan B. Anthony (when the neighborhood in which she was born was called simply Adams), is a hilly city that still boasts stately Greek Revival, Second Empire and Italianate mansions that once were home to wealthy owners of textile mills and shoe factories that boomed during the Civil War. A good example of Second Empire architecture, The Blackinton Mansion, now is the city library.
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