There Was No Way-fer Necco to Carry On

From Dave Brigham:

If you've ever eaten Sky Bars, Clark Bars, Mary Janes, Squirrel Nut Zippers or Sweethearts, then you may be mourning the loss of the New England Confectionery Company, or Necco. OK, Mary Janes aren't worth crying over. But the rest of them are. I think.

Oh yeah, and NECCO Wafers. Those are good.

Necco melted down this past July after a 117-year ride on the conveyor belt of American candy-making, the last several undertaken amid dwindling revenues and market share. In 1901, the company was formed "through the merger of several small confectionery companies located in the Greater Boston area, with ancestral companies dating back to the 1840s," according to Wikipedia. Round Hill Investments, which specializes in apartment buildings, student housing and light industrial assets, and whose principals likely travel the world in hermetically sealed hyper-drive tubes, bought NECCO for $17.3 million this summer, then promptly turned around and dumped the whole box of sweets on Spangler Candy Company for an undisclosed sum.

Spangler, which makes Dum Dums, Circus Peanuts, Candy Canes and other products, will continue to make Necco Wafers and Sweethearts, those chalky, multi-colored candies that my college girlfriend, upon receiving some from me for Valentine's Day, called "piss hearts." Sweet.

I recently visited the Revere, Mass., Necco plant, which closed with little warning this past July, in hopes of getting some great shots of what I hoped would be an old-school, Wonka-esque facility of sugar-coated wonder. Instead, I found this.

Originally located in South Boston, Necco eventually moved to a location along Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge, as seen below.

The Necco factory, close by the M.I.T. campus, was converted to a Novartis pharmaceutical facility in the 1990's. See this link for a photo of the property's water tower when it was painted like a package of Necco Wafers, which I recall seeing when I first moved to the Boston area, and for several years after.

To see some shots of Necco's old haunt in South Boston's Fort Point neighborhood, see April 22, 2018, "Fort Point Channel -- It's Electric!"