Thomas MacMillan Photo
On the brink of opening its doors once again, the abandoned Winchester factory at the crossroads of DIxwell and Newhallville bears the marks of years of abandonment. Wind whistles through broken windows, paint hangs from walls, and tiny mushrooms grow between floorboards.
All that’s about to change, as a plan gets underway to redevelop the old rifle factory at the corner of Winchester Avenue and Munson Street. Starting in the next couple of months, workers will begin to bring the old building back to life, starting with the removal of asbestos and lead paint. Gov. M. Jodi Rell has pledged $5.5 million dollars toward the project. That money will help prepare the building for its first tenants, New Haven’s financial services start-up darling, Higher One. Read about that here.
In the meantime, the buildings wait silently behind plywood windows and locked gates. Inside, signs of decay abound alongside traces of the building’s former life as a major city employer, where thousands of New Haveners spent their days manufacturing the famous “Gun That Won The West.”
On the ground levels, the floors are squishy and rotted. Fungus grows from cracks in the planks.
Upstairs, the floors are buckled, but dry. Light filters through peeling paint.
Paint, likely made with lead, flakes and falls off the walls everywhere.
Drop ceilings have dropped.
In one former workroom, a leftover sign offers a warning.
Another sign encourages employees to reach 100 percent quality work. Nearby, someone tacked up several mailings from sweepstakes icon Ed McMahon, announcing that “M. Zito is about to be announced as our biggest Connecticut winner in history.”
The workroom floor is littered with shotgun shell casings.
They spill out of a test-firing sandbank chamber.
Near the work floor…
offices stand empty…
… or, inexplicably, filled with carpeting.
Afternoon light pierces the building.
A cracked decal reads “Winchester Gun Advisory Center.”
In work areas on other floors, only fragments of equipment remain.
Even bathroom fixtures have been removed.
All traces of valuable copper have been removed by scavengers. Other signs of human presence abound, in the form of tags and graffiti.
Outside, the wind blows through the quiet central courtyard, as the buildings await their new inhabitants.
