UPDATE #2: What a Dump

From You Know Who:

From the very first moment I saw the ruins near the dump in my town, I was obsessed. I was driving to a playdate with my daughter, back in late 2010, when I rolled past the former O'Hara Waltham Dial Company in Waltham, right over the line from Newton (see February 27, 2011, "UPDATE: What a Dump").

Obviously derelict for decades, the old brick buildings were beautiful in their decay. And although they were located in an area with other low-slung industrial and commercial buildings, they were also close to single-family homes and apartment buildings. I can only imagine how difficult it was for local parents to keep their kids away from this toxic playground.

I'd seen ruins like these cleared away and replaced with shiny new buildings, but the O'Hara pile seemed like it had the potential to take on legendary status, like the Parthenon.

Built in 1897, the building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1989. Initially involved in watchmaking, like so many other late 19th century companies in Waltham, O'Hara eventually got into the business of producing brass inserts for beer steins. The company went out of business in the 1920's, and other industries took over the property for a number of years.

The guy who hosted the playdate all those years ago told me that there had been a plan to knock down the complex and put up condos, but that the clean-up costs were evidently too high, and so the property sat empty year after year, decade after decade. I returned to the property, camera in hand once again, two years after my initial visit. I realized that while fencing kept (most) people from going on the property from the front, there was almost certainly a way to access it from the, ahem, backside (see July 8, 2013, "What a Dump: A Different View").

Now, nearly seven years later, the legend has fallen.

The process of cleaning up the property began in the spring of 2019 after a neighbor noticed from an abutting rooftop that the O'Hara building's roof had collapsed, according to this Wicked Local article. The City of Waltham gave the building's owners 90 days to come up with a demolition plan. The State of Massachusetts provided assistance with the site's remediation. The buildings began coming down last summer.

The owner, Acorn Holdings, develops and manages luxury apartments in the Boston area, per its web site. The company has completed three such projects in Cambridge, and has others in the works in that city, as well as this one in Waltham. The company hasn't announced plans yet for the site, which totals 53,000 square feet.

Stay tuned....