For anyone that has ever visited Old Ellicott City, you would have undoubtedly seen the huge hulking industrial building at the bottom of Main Street that appeared to be abandoned. What was once an operational flour mill is now slated to be redeveloped into apartments, retail, and restaurant space.
This will be a welcome addition to breathe additional life into the historic city, while drawing in more visitors!
Historic Ellicott Mill's $65 million redevelopment moves forward
By Melody Simmons – Reporter, Baltimore Business Journal Jul 28, 2022 Updated Jul 28, 2022, 2:18pm EDT
An ambitious plan to convert the former flour mill at the gateway to Main Street in Ellicott City into 190 apartments is moving forward with a design hearing set for next month.
The $65 million development will allow Baltimore developer David Tufaro's Terra Nova Ventures to breathe new life into another vacant old mill and add a luxury residential cache to a once-rural corner of Frederick Road in tiny Oella in Baltimore County.
Tufaro has already converted a pair of 19th-century former mills in the Jones Falls Valley into mixed-use properties over the past decade. His Mill No. 1 and Whitehall Mill in North Baltimore have transformed the hulking former industrial structures into apartment, office, entertainment, retail and restaurant space.
The Oella mill is about 100 years old and has been vacant for two years at the Howard and Baltimore county lines after the company consolidated its operations out of state. "Absent this effort, there will be a giant white elephant sitting there at the entrance to Ellicott City," Tufaro said Thursday. "We are not changing the site, and [we are] not changing the footprint of the site."
Designs for Ellicott Mill will be detailed in a public hearing before an administrative law judge in Baltimore County on Aug. 11 and Aug. 12 as part of a routine development review process by the county planning and zoning office. The hearing will include public comments and reports from county agencies about the proposed redevelopment. The old mill has already been rezoned for multifamily construction.
The 150,000-square-foot mill has been a landmark in Ellicott City since it first opened at 27 Frederick Road in 1942 to manufacture flour for breads, cakes and snack foods. The mill was later bought by Wilkens Rogers Co., which closed it in early 2020, laying off its final 30 employees after merging operations with other mills in the Midwest.
Plans call to gut the mill's interior and develop the apartments in the eight-story tower. An amenity area will be added to a rooftop deck near a swimming pool and restaurant space. The lobby will draw on the site's industrial roots with a rustic look, renderings show, and residents and visitors can park in a 100-space flat-surface lot that surrounds the mill tower.
An entity of Terra Nova has a contract to purchase the plant and three-acre site. The project will take 18 months to complete once it kicks off and designs have been created by Alexander Design Studio, headquartered nearby on Main Street.
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