Former Bonin Spinning Mill succumbs to wrecking ball
WOONSOCKET – Members of city’s Little League teams won’t be hitting home runs onto the roof of the nearby Bonin Spinning Mill next season thanks to an ongoing demolition project at the Mendon Road and Aylsworth Avenue industrial property.
The former textile plant, once part of Woonsocket’ s leading role in the weaving of wool and cotton cloth products, had fallen into disrepair in recent years and become too far gone to update for reuse, according to Pete Dufresne, a Lincoln real estate broker and principal in 1265 Mendon LLC, the property’s owner.
“It needed a tremendous amount of work, it needed a new roof, and it just wasn’t feasible to do,” Dufresne, a member of the Spectrum Real Estate Consultants team with Keller Williams, explained.
“In order to use the building again, it would have had to be brought up to today’s building codes and that would have been very costly,” Dufresne said.
Rather than leave the building in a condemned and dangerous state, Dufresne said the decision was made to clear away the old mill and prepare the 3.8 acre lot for reuse.
“Our goal right now is to get the building down,” Dufresne said while noting the ongoing work to raze the two-story brick and steel main building at the site containing 80,000 square feet of space.
A good portion of the structure has already been demolished including much of the second floor, Dufresne noted.
While Woonsocket once had many multi-story mills operating in the city, today companies prefer to run operations all based in a ground floor building, according to Dufresne.
“No one wants 40,000 square feet on the second floor,” Dufresne said.
Exactly what will become of the property remains to be seen. Dufresne said he has no plans for the site at the moment and is just focused on clearing away the main building and renovating two smaller buildings at the site of 9,000 square feet and 1,200 square feet.
Front lot of the mill seen from Mendon Road, where tractor trailers and other vehicles park, is a separately owned parcel with an easement for access to the Bonin property.
The Dollar General Store next door to the parking lot was built on another separately owned parcel of land in 2015.
Dufresne said his company purchased the Bonin Spinning Mill from its prior owner, Leo Boudoin, in August.
The plant was still operating as a textile operation in the mid-1970s when a fire broke out in stored material products in a back section of the mill. Woonsocket fire crews brought the stubborn fire under control, however, and the damage area repaired.
The mill also holds a highlight of local history involving native son, Terrance Murray of Fleet Bank and Bank of America fame.
The story told by Murray is that his father pulled him from Mount St. Charles Academy to learn a bit about life while working a year at Bonin Spinning the 11 to 7 a.m. shift.
Murray went on to Providence Country Day after the experience and Harvard before ending up in banking and on the path to his future as one
of Rhode Island’s top business success stories.
“It’s obviously a sad time to see any mill coming down,” Garrett Mancieri, a local real estate broker and promoter of Woonsocket’s commercial properties, said of Bonin Spinning on Wednesday.
“But it is also exciting to see a new building go up that will attract new companies to Woonsocket,” Mancieri added.
“Bonin Spinning was an old building that needed a lot of work and I think it is much easier to attract a company to a new building rather than an old one,” Mancieri said.