🔒Manchester advances historic mill apartment plan, approves Apache Trucking hub

The Manchester Planning and Zoning Commission on Monday cleared a procedural hurdle for the conversion of a historic Cheney Brothers silk mill into apartments and approved a long-stalled truck terminal in the Buckland Industrial Park that it had rejected in February. Acting as the town’s Inland Wetlands Agency, the commission determined that a plan to convert the former silk mill at 160 Hartford Road into 40 apartments would not have a significant impact on nearby wetlands — a finding that allows the application to proceed without a public hearing. The vote was 6-1. WW Manchester LLC, an affiliate of Brooklyn, New York-based Spectra Construction & Development Corp., bought the roughly 30,000-square-foot Clark Building for $1.7 million in June. Spectra has become one of Connecticut’s more active developers of adaptive-reuse housing, with a string of historic conversions in Hartford. Plans by Farmington architecture firm Schadler Selnau Associates call for 15 apartments on each of the first two floors and 10 on a loft level, with four fully accessible units and the remaining 36 meeting a secondary accessibility standard. The proposal also seeks to change the building’s use from its historic silk-mill designation to residential. The town issued a separate permit in early July for interior demolition only. The building, which dates to about 1870, once held the folding and inspection rooms where finished cloth was packaged for shipping across the Cheney Brothers campus, and in later decades was folded into the neighboring Fuss & O’Neill office complex.

Also Monday night, the commission voted 5-2 to grant an inland wetlands permit to Singh Realty Group LLC, the real estate arm of Massachusetts-based Apache Trucking, for an operations hub at 51 Commerce Road. Members followed with a unanimous vote to approve a special exception for the use and certified the project’s erosion and sedimentation control plan. The approvals mark a turnaround for a proposal the commission denied earlier this year, when it found the applicant had not demonstrated prudent and feasible alternatives to reduce impacts on wetlands. The plan calls for an 8,100-square-foot, one-story building with office space and a four-bay maintenance garage on the 12-acre parcel. The site would also include 95 tractor-trailer parking spaces, four loading areas and 31 employee and visitor spaces, serving as the refrigerated carrier’s dispatch, logistics and administrative base. The permit is valid for five years, with work in the regulated area to be completed within one year of the start of construction.