Nine years after the City of Waterbury acquired the polluted and crumbling Anamet industrial campus near the city center – and after millions of dollars invested in its rehabilitation – an end to the cleanup may be in sight and a new user identified.
The Waterbury Development Corp. board is set to vote Friday on using $13.3 million in state grants to complete the cleanup of more than a century of pollution at the roughly 17-acre site at 698 South Main St.
The property borders the Naugatuck River near the southern gateway to downtown Waterbury.
The city previously used millions of dollars in state grants to demolish most of the buildings on the industrial campus, which once employed hundreds of people making flexible metal hoses and electrical conduits.
The city also borrowed nearly $2.8 million to install a new roof on a roughly 200,000-square-foot, high-bay building it hoped would help attract a buyer and new users.
Finding a user proved difficult. The city marketed the property three times and evaluated multiple proposals before reaching a tentative agreement with Cornerstone Realty, a local industrial property owner operated by the Albert family, which has deep roots in Waterbury’s business community.
If officials approve the new funding, the Waterbury Development Corp. can seek bids for the cleanup work and have the property ready for sale in about a year, WDC Executive Director James Nardozzi said.
Any agreement to sell the property would require approval from the board of 698 South Main St. Inc., a company the city formed to own the site and oversee its rehabilitation. The organization is led by Catherine Awwad, who also chairs the Waterbury Development Corp. board.
City officials and a Cornerstone representative confirmed sales talks are in the works but said they could not yet disclose conditions of the potential deal.
According to documents provided to Waterbury Development Corp. board members ahead of Friday’s meeting, Cornerstone would acquire the property and redevelop it as office and warehouse space for Torrco, a Waterbury-based plumbing supply company. Cornerstone may also lease portions of the property to other tenants, the documents state.
Waterbury Mayor Paul Pernerewski rejected offers from Cornerstone and a California-based real estate investor in 2024. At the time, Pernerewski said the proposals were not “the right fit,” given the amount of public money invested in the property.
At the time, Cornerstone had proposed to partner with Torrco in a $1.8 million purchase of the property.
This time, Pernerewski said, city officials determined they needed to help secure a new home for the growing Torrco or risk losing the company to another municipality. He said the price under negotiation is approaching the nearly $2.8 million that city taxpayers have directly invested in the property.
“Basically, it is to maintain a very good company in Waterbury if we can,” Pernerewski said. “This money will go a long way to get to the final cleanup, which is holding up the deal from being consummated.”
Cornerstone Vice President Jake Albert, in an email response to questions, said his company and Torrington-based construction contractor O&G Industries have invested “significant time and resources since early 2022 to bring this complex transaction with the City of Waterbury to fruition.”
Albert said the city selected the development group in May. He noted that Cornerstone and O&G are family-owned companies with histories stretching back more than a century and deep ties to the Greater Waterbury area.
The redevelopment would transform a blighted former factory in the city’s South End into a taxpaying property occupied by a growing local company, Pernerewski said.
The factory, which closed around 2000, has long attracted illegal dumping, drug use, vandalism and other nuisance activity.
Pernerewski said the project illustrates the extensive public investment required to clean up former industrial properties that once powered
Waterbury’s economy but were left unusable by decades of pollution. Such cleanups are generally too costly for private developers to undertake without government assistance, he said.
“It’s going to take property that has been sitting vacant and deteriorating and put it back into productive use,” Pernerewski said. “These factories throughout the city drove Waterbury to the heights of economic success through the 1950s and 60s, and then dragged it down.”
