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Deal in works for Paint Factory; Ocean Alliance group to move research HQ to Rocky Neck

By Richard Gaines
Staff writer


The Ocean Alliance, a nonprofit research organization based in Lincoln, has agreed to acquire and move into the Paint Factory, whose 19th century buildings on the harbor's headlands have become the landmark image of Gloucester's working waterfront.

The organization signed a purchase and sales agreement Monday with Vahid Nickpour, the Boston-based developer who spent three years in negotiations with the city's Historical Commission hoping to clear legal hurdles and convert the two acres of old industrial buildings into a mansion.

The sales price was not announced, but Richard Rosenfeld, who lives in the home on property adjacent to the Paint Factory at the tip of historic Rocky Neck and has been a party in the negotiations, said the alliance would pay about $2 million.

"We're coming here because we want a new home, and this is a part of history," said Iain Kerr, CEO of the alliance, which was founded in 1971 by biologist Roger Payne. Payne gained fame for discovering that the sounds humpback whales made were actually songs sung to one another.

Kerr called the city the ideal home for his organization. "It's a synergy - Gloucester and the Ocean Alliance," he said. "We've been 36 years lost in the woods of Lincoln. This will brand our organization."

Kerr said restoration and redevelopment of the property could cost between $6 million and $10 million.

As news of the agreement passed through the city's network of Paint Factory lovers by word of mouth, sighs of relief were audible behind the applause.

"We couldn't ask for a better investment at this time in our city, given what the Paint Factory symbolizes to our community," Mayor Carolyn Kirk said. "Ocean Alliance's commitment to preserving and restoring the building ensures this part of our maritime heritage will not disintegrate anytime soon."

Kerr and the alliance are known for ground-breaking, values-infused research. In 1979, Payne predicted memorably in National Geographic Magazine that pollution would replace harpoons as the main threat to whales.

Kerr described Payne as a "sort of forward thinker," and said the alliance, which has a staff of less than two dozen but extends its reach with working partnerships with academics, strives to be a "voice of reason for the ocean."

The most visible face of the Ocean Alliance is its research vessel, the 93-foot Odyssey, which has been based here and serviced at the Gloucester Marine Railway since its return from an epic, 51/2-year research trip through the world's oceans that was documented on public television.

In separate interviews yesterday, Kerr and Nickpour agreed that the sale could close by mid-June.

Kerr said the due diligence would entail "understanding the site - the foundations, the grounds, are they polluted, are the structures sound? We have a group of very generous donors; they're trusting us," he said.

Kerr said the alliance's first job will be to restore the Paint Factory, which has not been altered except by rain, wind, storms and waves since the first of its buildings were erected on the tip of Rocky Neck in 1870 by marine paint innovators in the years before artists from New York City and Boston made the Neck into one of the nation's first summer art colonies.

The iconic nature of the complex, the community's emotional attachment to it and its historical importance as an authentic relic of Gloucester's schooner era and the world's busiest fishing port complicated and frustrated a series of redevelopment efforts dating to 1980 when the factory finally went dark.

Since the complex was built, the development of Rocky Neck into a little peninsula of homes, studios and summer accommodations around the Paint Factory effectively trapped it - at the end of a private road at land's end, further confounding redeveloper's schemes.

The city government and citizen Paint Factory lovers were torn by their worry about its ability to survive long abandoned without help and concern that redevelopment would alter its authenticity, making progress on Nickpour's effort painfully slow and tortured.

"It took awhile to get there," he said, "but the best use of the site showed up. It's what most people in Gloucester wanted: An icon is what it was, and an icon is what it's going to remain."

A previous owner obtained a demolition permit in the late '90s after selling an option to a duo of developers who tried and failed to win the right to condominiumize the Paint Factory.

The Army Corps of Engineers, the Massachusetts and Gloucester Historical Commissions and the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection all have asserted authority of some parts of Nickpour's plans for converting the property into a private home.

Yale University's School of Art and the Massachusetts College of Art both flirted with the complex as a summer school site two years ago.

Robert Heineman, an architect and chairman of the city Historical Commission's Paint Factory Subcommittee, said what legal hurdles remained to the Ocean Alliance's alternative development concept - a new marine industrial use, outputting clean intellectual property - were not clear.

"I'm not saying I'm intimidated here," Kerr said, "but it's a building that does have a fatal attraction. Here we are on the threshold," he added.

Kerr said the Ocean Alliance would not object to signing a facade easement that has been two years in the drafting by lawyers for Nickpour and the Historical Commission, aimed at ensuring that the exterior of the complex's main building - the one across which "MANUFACTORY" is spelled - remains as is forever.

"How does a nonprofit identify itself?" he said. "As a group that trashed a piece of history? At the most fundamental level, if I can make it look like it did in 1870, that would be ideal."

But Kerr also said the alliance very much wants - if not needs - to secure permission from the state and federal governments to build a pier adjacent to the Paint Factory at which the Odyssey could be moored for at least part of the year, to bring the land-based and floating research components of the organization close together.

Kerr cautioned that the due diligence and resolution of legal uncertainties remain before the alliance could take ownership.

"A deal is not a deal until it's done," he said though plainly optimistic. "Until Monday, I didn't know that we could agree on a price."

The Ocean Alliance became involved through a serendipitous encounter last summer in the Last Stop, an East Gloucester variety store near the gateway to Rocky Neck.

Heineman, who had volunteered to head up the Paint Factory subcommittee of the Historical Commission, had been brainstorming possible buyers for Nickpour and began thinking about the Ocean Alliance because of seeing the Odyssey at the Marine Railway at the end of the neck.

Inside the Last Stop, he said he saw two members of the crew wearing Ocean Alliance team T-shirts.

"Are you interested in buying the Paint Factory?" he asked.

"Interested? Is it available?" the crew members responded.

Fifteen minutes later, Heineman said, Kerr was on the phone to him.

Kerr said he'd passed it in the harbor too many times to count, but enough to fall in love.

"I'd been dreaming about that building for 10 years," he told the Times.

Richard Gaines may be contacted at rgaines@gloucestertimes.com.