Places Restored, Threatened, Saved, and Lost

Preservation Magazine’s Summer 2025 Issue

In each Transitions section, Preservation Magazine highlights places of local and national importance that have recently been restored, are currently threatened, have been saved from demolition or neglect, or have been lost. View all five from Summer 2025 here.

By Malea Martin

Restored: Essex Company Machine Shop

When the Essex Company Machine Shop was completed in 1848, it represented a turning point for the city of Lawrence, Massachusetts. “People moved to Lawrence primarily [to] work in that building,” says Scott Maenpaa, project manager at The Architectural Team (TAT). “The area itself really turned from a rural farming community into a major industrial center.” More than 175 years later, WinnDevelopment and TAT have transformed the former factory into 86 units of mixed-income housing called Stone Mill Lofts. The Essex Land and Water Company built the 149,200-square-foot structure to manufacture tools, mill machinery, and water turbines. After the building’s second owner, the Lawrence Machine Shop Company, closed in 1857, the building was sold to the Everett Mills Corporation. By the time WinnDevelopment purchased the property in 2021, the exterior of the building had changed very little.

“It’s got some nice pink hues to it,” says Maenpaa of the stone facade, made primarily of granite. The team cleaned the exterior and replaced the slate roof, which was delaminating and cracking, with matching slate. The windows were replaced to increase the building’s energy efficiency—it’s now an all-electric structure—and the new ones match the look of the originals. The $39.2 million project, which utilized state and federal historic tax credits as well as Low-Income Housing Tax Credits, was unveiled in September 2024. “It really gives people a sense of place and where they came from,” Maenpaa says.