Home Posts tagged Ludlow Mass.

What’s Changing in Ludlow … and What Isn’t

By
Karen Randall
Community Spotlight Special Coverage

Community Spotlight

Marc Strange

Marc Strange considers it “disappointing” that the majority of the town wasn’t ready for a charter change.

When Marc Strange came to Ludlow as town administrator in the spring of 2022, he saw an opportunity to take a leadership position in a bustling community and use his experience and skills — he was formerly director of Planning and Development for Agawam and selectman in Longmeadow — to effect change in this community.

One big proposed change is not happening, but there’s still plenty on his plate.

“When I applied for the job, the number-one priority was the change of government,” he said of a push to change the town’s charter and system of government — now a board of selectmen and representative town meeting — to one many felt was more befitting a community of roughly 21,000 residents, either a town manager and town council, a mayor and city council, or perhaps a hybrid model.

“That’s been a focus of mine, although I wasn’t involved in the creation of the charter,” he told BusinessWest of the effort by a charter-review committee that eventually settled on a town council/town manager model, which included the hiring of the Edward J. Collins Center for Public Management to guide the process and a series of public forums. “I took it upon myself to make sure we were pushing toward on that, putting in the request to fund a consultant and just keep that ball moving.”

But the ball stopped rolling at a town meeting earlier this month, when the charter and the government change was voted down, 41-29.

“That just means that we’re going to continue status quo, the way we’ve been operating,” Strange said. “It’s disappointing because the charter committee put together a good charter, but the town just wasn’t ready for the change. The town manager would have replaced the board of selectmen, and then a town council would have replaced town meeting as a legislative body. You’re just able to get things done quicker.

“All the surrounding towns have grown, and that has contributed to our growth. And the town of Ludlow has grown tremendously since we started.”

“We have about 21,000 people, and a $84 million budget. We’re really a small city. It certainly has a town feel to it, but in terms of the form of the government, the structure of the government, I personally think it would have been more efficient to make the change. But the town meeting didn’t see it that way.”

For many town-meeting participants, Strange said, it came down to a question of representation.

“There are a little more than 100 members, technically, but there there were 70 at this town meeting. You’re going from that many people and that many voices down to a seven-member town council. I think the overriding sentiment was, the more voices you have, the more democratic a process.”

Still, he added, “Easthampton is a city, Palmer is a city, Southbridge is a city. These are smaller towns, smaller than us, that have city forms of government.”

Strange had other goals when he was hired in 2022, including efforts to make the government more efficient, which has included balancing out staffing and combining the treasurer’s and collector’s offices, and development efforts downtown.

Karen Randall

Karen Randall says location is her business’s number-one asset.

“I grew up in the economic-development world, in municipal government, and that’s one of the reasons why I was so excited to join Ludlow,” he said. “There’s so much potential here.”

 

Location, Location, Location

Karen Randall has certainly seen plenty of change in Ludlow, most of it positive. In 1962, her father built the first store at Randall’s Farm, and in 1997, the building underwent a significant expansion, including a greenhouse and big produce department.

The business also added “a postage stamp of a kitchen,” she added, which would turn out to be entirely inadequate as the bakery, deli, and prepared-food operations took off as people’s lifestyles changed.

“Center Street, where the pike exit is, is pretty built out and super busy. There are a lot of businesses there. But the downtown area, I feel like we need to really focus on that, because residents’ quality of life will rise if we can create a more exciting downtown area.”

“The kind of customers we have are mostly local customers. They’re on their way home or on their way to work, and it’s very convenient for them to have home-cooked food — not cooked in their home, but cooked in our home. We prepare everything from scratch, for the most part. And that department just went way beyond our expectations. It’s almost 40% of everything we do now, which we never saw coming. The garden center is still a big part, and produce is still a huge part, but prepared food was a surprise.”

Guests also come for the homemade hard ice cream, as well as family activities that peak in the fall with pumpkin decorating, scarecrow making, and seasonal games. Randall said the farm draws regulars from a roughly 20-mile range, from communities like Longmeadow, Westfield, and Enfield, Conn. “Sometimes people make a weekend trip just for their groceries. We have a lot of specialty grocery; we do a lot of gluten-free and allergy-friendly food. We have a big following for that.”

The Ludlow Mills project

The Ludlow Mills project, with its mix of housing, businesses, and the restored, iconic clocktower, continues to progress each year.

But after talking about what Randall’s Farm offers, she was quick to explain what Ludlow itself offers — notably its location off Mass Pike exit 54 and near a number of growing residential communities. It also benefits from its own growth, with new residential developments in recent years (more on that later).

“We’re in a great location. Location, I would say, is our number-one asset,” Randall told BusinessWest. “Having the turnpike less than a mile away, people in the surrounding towns who are using the turnpike drive by us very often. Belchertown has grown, all the surrounding towns have grown, and that has contributed to our growth. And the town of Ludlow has grown tremendously since we started.

“It’s a great community to have a business in, with great people. The town gives us excellent young employees; we have a lot of people that start in high school, and hopefully they stay while they go to college and come back and work holidays or weekends or summers,” she went on. “Some of our young employees stay with us for six years or so until they graduate from college, and then we hate to lose them. They become nurses and engineers and go on to their careers, and they leave a big hole for us because they were excellent employees.”

Ludlow at a glance

Year Incorporated: 1774
Population: 21,002
Area: 28.2 square miles
County: Hampden
Residential Tax Rate: $18.09
Commercial Tax Rate: $18.09
Median Household Income: $53,244
Median Family Income: $67,797
Type of Government: Board of Selectmen, Representative Town Meeting
Largest Employers: Hampden County House of Correction; Encompass Rehabilitation Hospital; Massachusetts Air National Guard; Kleeberg Sheet Metal Inc.
*Latest information available

All that said, “the business is doing well,” Randall noted. “We continue to grow and change with the trends and what customers want and what other stores like us are doing. We try to stay in tune with what’s happening so we can deliver the best to our customers.”

 

Downtown Developments

The town has been focusing on its downtown area in recent years as well, not just at Ludlow Mills, but in the East Street corridor, where it has planned extensive infrastructure improvements to make the street more safe, pedestrian-friendly, and aesthetically pleasing, as well as expanding its District Improvement Financing (DIF) area, which had previously covered just the footprint of the mills, to East Street.

“Our East Street corridor is sort of our Main Street, and there are a lot of small businesses there that have a loyal following and are very popular,” Strange said. “So we created a DIF last year so, with any developments made in that district, instead of that additional tax revenue going into the general fund, we can keep it in the district for infrastructure improvements.

“I’m really looking forward to being able to improve the look and the feel, but also the infrastructure of East Street. We’re also going to be repaving the roads around down State Street, which is where the mills are, then around to East Street,” he added. “Center Street, where the pike exit is, is pretty built out and super busy. There are a lot of businesses there. But the downtown area, I feel like we need to really focus on that, because residents’ quality of life will rise if we can create a more exciting downtown area.”

One of the most recent business openings on East Street is BarBurrito, a new restaurant venture from Bill Collins, owner of Center Square Grill in East Longmeadow. “We were thrilled to see BarBurrito come in,” Strange said. “Bill Collins has established businesses that are popular, so to have him come invest his money into East Street, I was really excited to see that.

“There are a lot of small businesses on East Street that have a loyal following, but we do have some storefronts that tend to turn over,” Strange added. “So we’re really hoping to, again, raise the excitement level of the downtown area, beautify it, and have more businesses like BarBurrito come in and build out those storefronts.”

As for Ludlow Mills, that remains an ongoing process, one that began two decades ago and ramped up when Westmass Area Development Corp. acquired the property 13 years ago. The 95 residential units at Mill 8 should be complete next month, complimenting the 75 units in Mill 10 and a series of commercial developments across the complex’s footprint. Meanwhile, the clock tower in Mill 8 completed its renovation this year.

“Every single year there’s something. There’s always cranes and activity down there. It’s exciting, and I think it gets people excited about the future,” Strange said, noting that the new residential units are for age 55 and up, and there is a great need for that kind of housing locally.

“I can see a vibrant downtown in Ludlow,” he added. “We have a lot of beautiful residential areas, particularly in the mountains and certainly closer to downtown as well. The clocktower so iconic. I remember, before I started here, coming over the bridge to go to Randall’s and looking to the right and seeing the clock tower. It just made you feel like you had arrived someplace. Now we have corporate resources that are putting money into the area.

“I’m really excited about what the downtown could be,” Strange went on. “I feel like, if we can complete the downtown and update it, revitalize it, and make it exciting, it’s really going to make a difference for Ludlow. That’s my focus.”

Vanished Valley Brewing Rolls with the Punches

By
From left, Vanished Valley principals Joshua Britton, Michael Rodrigues, and Manny Vital
Restaurants

Yes They Can

 

From left, Vanished Valley principals Joshua Britton, Michael Rodrigues, and Manny Vital

From left, Vanished Valley principals Joshua Britton, Michael Rodrigues, and Manny Vital.

 

Josh Britton remembers the early, heady days of Vanished Valley Brewing Co. — and the challenging ones that followed.

He had started brewing beer in his garage around 2015 when he met Michael Rodrigues, owner of Europa Black Rock Bar & Grille in Ludlow, and Manny Vital, who owned Europa’s building on Route 21. Vital retrofitted a building out back that became the first Vanished Valley brewery; the name was chosen to honor the drowned Quabbin Reservoir towns of Dana, Enfield, Greenwich, and Prescott.

“We started that process in 2016, but the licensure took nine months for approvals at the state level. Then we started hammering it out in 2017,” Britton said. Within a year or two, the brewery was rated third-best in Massachusetts by BeerAdvocate.

“We had lines out the door,” he added. “We were only producing like 10 barrels at a time, which for that space is a lot of barrelage; it’s pretty tight in there. We were selling cans in a tent next to the building and doing well. And we were fueling Europa with our kegs. We had people show up and ask, ‘oh, where’s your taproom?’ And they found out it was just a small, 20-by-20 space.”

Rodrigues decided to retire the Europa brand early in 2019 when he saw an opportunity to expand Vanished Valley with expanded production space and a food operation, and the three principals started gutting and updating the building, and also putting up an addition.

“Mike stayed up nights smoking meat — night after night after night, just to meet demand. So we were delivering barbecue and beer to door to door, and it stuck.”

“We wanted to add the food element in a bigger retail space, so it made sense, obviously, to do it right there,” Britton said. “We worked on it all throughout 2019 while still producing beer, and then we were ready to go in January 2020.”

Everyone knows what happened next.

“We had just opened our doors, and then a couple months later, it came to a halt because of COVID,” he said. “It was an interesting time. It forced us to kind of relook at the brand and pivot and decide what fell within the guidelines of what we could and couldn’t do.”

The pivots they came up with not only kept the business afloat during the pandemic, they may have actually raised its profile.

“No place could open and serve food, but we were allowed to deliver food — and beer, for the first time in Massachusets. So we started doing takeout. We didn’t have barbecue as a food option at the time, and Mike came up with the great idea to say, ‘hey, how cool would it be to have fresh barbecue and beer delivered to your door?’

“So we added that as a takeout option, and it was the most popular one we had,” Britton continued. “Mike stayed up nights smoking meat — night after night after night, just to meet demand. So we were delivering barbecue and beer to door to door, and it stuck. We still have great barbecue today; we kept it on the menu.”

Murals in Vanished Valley’s lower level reflect the theme of the drowned Quabbin towns.

Murals in Vanished Valley’s lower level reflect the theme of the drowned Quabbin towns.

Between the successful delivery operation, as well as two Paycheck Protection Program loans and an Economic Injury Disaster Loan, the team was able to keep the operation running. “It was a stressful year, but we made it. Once we were allowed to open the doors, we took all the necessary precautions with social distancing and things like that. It kept the lights on, and it kept the brand alive.”

 

Beneath the Surface

Some of the brewery’s beer selections — 1939 Amber Ale, Cellar Hole Series, Lost Town Stout, etc. — pay homage to the history of the Quabbin.

“The name itself, Vanished Valley, is the tip of the cap to the Quabbin Reservoir and the people that sacrificed for the benefit of others,” Britton said. “We try to keep the names of the beers as Quabbin-esque as possible. Sometimes it’s hard to do, and we just come up with other ideas. But the brand itself commemorates the Quabbin area.”

At any given time, Vanished Valley makes, pours, and distributes — to liquor stores and other restaurants across Massachusetts, from New York to Cape Cod — an array of IPAs, ales, stouts, and more, he added.

“We are very IPA-heavy, but that’s not to say that we don’t appreciate and still produce the classic brands, like a good lager or a pilsner. Some of our bestsellers in-house are actually our light beers. But when we distribute, the more popular ones are the IPAs.”

Britton explained that Vanished Valley straddles two different models.

“When you’re thinking about a brewery, you can be one of three different types of breweries. You can be a contract brewer, where you hire someone to brew your beer for you, and they send it out, and that’s it. Look at Jim Koch’s story with Sam Adams; that’s how he started. Then there’s a straight manufacturing-like brewery, where all you’re doing is pumping liquid out the back door and putting it on the shelf in the store.

“Then there’s us. We’re a brewpub,” he went on. “We wanted to have the food element, but we didn’t want to give up on the opportunity for mass distribution. So we built the brewery to be a distribution model, but the retail side of the house is a straight brewpub. So I don’t need to produce a ton of beer for here, but I need to produce a ton of beer for the market. We wanted to go at it from both angles.”

As for the food element, Vanished Valley serves a broad menu of appetizers, soups and salads, wood-fired pizza, burgers and other handhelds, and, of course, barbecue platters featuring pulled pork, brisket, chicken, and St. Louis-style ribs. Dinner hours are more crowded than lunch, and Thursday through Sunday draw the biggest crowds.

“We have a beer garden out there in the warmer weather, with a massive tent,” Britton said, adding that Vanished Valley now allows groups to rent the space for weddings and large parties. “We have music out there; Manny built an amazing stage for our bands. We have a firepit … all the stuff that makes for a better environment.”

Inside, the brewery has also hosted events from a murder mystery dinner to a bonsai tree event to charcuterie board design, as well as events featuring outside vendors, like a chili cookoff.

“We wanted to have the food element, but we didn’t want to give up on the opportunity for mass distribution. So we built the brewery to be a distribution model, but the retail side of the house is a straight brewpub.”

“We rent this for smaller parties, too: birthday parties, anniversaries, retirement parties, stuff like that. We try to be a one-stop shop for as much as possible,” Britton said. “It’s hard to do sometimes, but compared to other brewpubs and breweries in the region, we are very, very diverse.

“I think we’re doing really well compared to a lot of other breweries in the industry,” he went on. “There have been some closures in the state, and we’re not going to be one of them. But you constantly have to tailor things to the customer, and that’s a constantly moving target. So one of the bigger challenges is staying fresh.”

 

Lager Than Life

Despite some shifts in the market, Britton said, Vanished Valley is doing well on both the brewpub and distribution sides.

“Our first struggle was dealing with the holy-grail beers — you know, what’s the next best thing? That’s what the craft-beer fanatics want — the search for the white whale, or whatever they want to call it. We were one of those whales initially, and we gained a lot of loyal customers, but there were some falloffs of people that wanted to find the next best thing.”

Another challenge has been the rise of ready-to-drink cocktails. “That sector of the industry is really doing a number on craft beers,” he said. “And now you have CBD-infused seltzers and stuff like that. So our distribution has gone down a little bit because of that.

“But our overall growth in sales has continued every year because of what we do here in the retail area with the restaurant,” Britton added. “If we were a straight production brewery, we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation right now. But on the restaurant side, the amazing customers we get here — from a local standpoint and people from out of state — have helped us stay afloat as a small, local business. We’re still very young. We’ve been going at it since 2017, but we’re still young.”

Vanished Valley also makes an effort to give back to the community, such as a beer produced to honor veterans every November, with proceeds donated to veteran organizations. The brewery also sponsors golf tournaments and gets involved with events like Ride to Remember, which honors fallen heroes.

“This is our backyard,” Britton said. “We all grew up here, and we’ve got to take care of it.”

Despite the challenges throughout the years, he added, Vanished Valley has continued to grow — from three employees just a few years ago to more than 30 today.

“We’ve done really well for ourselves. We’ve made a home for a lot of great customers that we appreciate so much. And the town has been nice to work with; they appreciate what we’re doing here from an economic standpoint. It’s just been a fun ride.”