The last of the buildings from the old Allied Leather Co. tannery have fallen, 32 years after the company closed, as the site transitions into its new life.
The final warehouse building torn down last week was a two-story brick structure on Canal Street that for years has sported a large white-on-red “X” telling firefighters that nobody works or lives inside.
Once the building’s remains are hauled off by the firm New Hampshire Demolition, site work will begin on the 2.5-acre property between the Contoocook River and Canal and Crescent streets.
According to a Concord City Manager’s report, that work will include grading, constructing a retaining wall and building a sewer pump station to handle a housing project to be developed by Caleb Development Corp., which plans to build 54 mostly low-income apartments at 35 Canal St.
The current work is funded by a federal Community Development Block Grant. Once done, the city will close on the sale of the parcel to the Caleb Development Corp.
“As part of that transaction, the city will retain approximately 1.5 acres of land directly along the banks of the Contoocook River for a potential future riverfront park,” the report said.
The property has been an industrial site since at least 1846, first as the site of warehouses for the nearby Penacook textile mill, then as the site of a tannery after the collapse of New England’s textile industry in the 1940s. The Allied Leather operation was large, and a wastewater treatment plant and coal-fired electrical generator were part of the operation on Canal and Crescent streets.
The tannery went bankrupt in 1987, and the city bought the property in 2006 after failed attempts to develop it. Cleanup was difficult as tanneries often leave pollution. The state Department of Environmental Services says that site “had been used for disposal of leather scraps, which were contaminated with chromium” and that as the buried leather decayed “it produced methane, posing an explosion risk and potential vapor intrusion and structural problems with new construction.”
Cleanup, funded in part by a $1.8 million grant from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, allowed more than 1,000 tons of leather scraps and associated soils, as well as nearly 1,000 tons of soil contaminated with other toxins, to be removed. Concord Hospital’s Penacook Family Practice has since been built on a portion of the parcel.
(David Brooks can be reached at 369-3313 or dbrooks@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @GraniteGeek.)
