A crew is removing the asbestos from a shuttered paper-recycling factory, as its owner prepares to knock it down. Across the street at the company’s headquarters, the regional sewer authority is in the process of moving in.
The sewer agency, the Water Pollution Control Authority (WPCA), has purchased the 360 East St. headquarters of Simkins Industries for $1.8 million. The WPCA plans to “peel the 1970s disco wallpaper” from the building’s second floor and move the agency’s administrative department there, including its financial, accounting, and engineering departments, by April 1, said acting director Gabe Varca.
The WPCA plans to move its customer service center to the building’s first floor from 165 Church St. next January. The new location will have far more (and free) parking, Varca noted.
Until then, Simkins will maintain its remaining local business office on the first floor as it oversees the death march of a local business across the street that started in 1901.
That was the Simkins paper recycling company. The factory shut down for good in August of 2006 after a former manager, Frank Camera (pictured), was brought out of retirement in a last-ditch attempt to keep more than 100 people working in the face of crushing competition from low-cost, modern Chinese factories.
Camera and Simkins made one last attempt to keep jobs at the site. They tried to convince the city to allow them to rent facilities to a company called TransLoad America to operate a trash transfer station making use of the rail lines bisecting the property and the waterfront access there. The plan failed to win city approval.
So now the company has brought in a New Jersey firm called Testa to remove asbestos from the the property’s buildings. Then Simkins will demolish the 6.39-acre site’s 26 edifices and put the land on the market.
“Hopefully,” Camera said on the premises Monday, “if the economy gets stronger [by then] we can bring in someone who can” return jobs to the site. “Some of my people still aren’t working.”