A familiar, if not attractive, sight to motorists on the New Kensington Bridge soon will be gone.
Red brick buildings, known for decades for being empty and having smashed windows, are among six at the New Kensington Advanced Manufacturing Park to be demolished over the summer as remediation efforts at the site continue, according to RIDC Senior Vice President Timothy White.
“There are several buildings along the river that are structurally unsound, or obsolete, so we’re partnering with the Westmoreland IDC to remediate them all and take them down,” White said, referring to the Westmoreland County Industrial Development Corp.
Those buildings are set to be demolished by the end of summer or early fall, White said.
Work will include the removal of the buildings’ foundations and slabs. New utilities will be brought to the area.
White noted some of these buildings are interconnected, so from the outside it may look like fewer than six buildings.
Fifteen other buildings will remain and be renovated, he said.
The site originally was home to Alcoa’s earliest production and research facilities.
The complex closed in 1971 before becoming Schreiber Industrial Park.
After years with little activity, New Kensington’s redevelopment authority bought it in 2018. In October 2023, RIDC and the Westmoreland County Industrial Development Corp. acquired the property to remake it into a modern manufacturing facility.
Re:Build Manufacturing will anchor the site.
That’s expected to create 300 new jobs that will span five existing buildings.
The park also is home to Affival, a steel fabricator with 70 employees, and air filter company Filterbuy, with about 120 employees.
The next phase for RIDC officials is to remove the buildings closest to the New Kensington Bridge, White said.
RIDC also plans to level the site to better its rail and river access for potential future manufacturers, he said. Inside the park, RIDC plans to improve its entrances at 14th and 15th streets in New Kensington, White said.
“Once the demolition is complete, we plan to raise the site out of the flood plain and prepare it for modern manufacturing building(s) with rail and potential water access,” White said. “This new pad will be able to accommodate almost twice the square footage of the functionally and structurally obsolete buildings being demolished now.”
White said there have been no issues thus far with the demolition and remediation.
“We’ve not run into anything,” he said of the New Kensington site.
He said construction and demolition is done in phases, so he did not have a total cost estimate, but he did say it would cost “several million dollars for demolition, remediation and site prep.” The park last summer was awarded $6 million in state funding to attract new businesses.
White hopes to have the first phase of site prep done this year.
“There’s a real focus with us and the Westmoreland County IDC to get this site prepped, attract new manufacturing and partner with local partners to bring jobs into New Kensington,” he said.