Laundry company opening at former Crown Cork site

March 23-- Mar. 23--LAWRENCE -- A New York company that rents and launders uniforms and linens for health care facilities will expand into an empty 188,000-square-foot plant in the city's industrial park off Andover Street, where it will employ 360 people, officials said Friday.

The company, A&P Coat, Apron & Linen Supply, told the city and state it will invest $11 million in the building, including raising the ceiling from 24 feet to 36 feet and moving in equipment worth $26 million. In return, the city will forgive $4.3 million in real estate and personal property taxes over the next decade and the state will forgive $1.8 million in corporate income taxes over up to 20 years.

The building was home to Crown Cork and Seal, which manufactured beverage cans there from 1969 until the company shut its operations in the city in early 2018. About 100 jobs were lost. The building -- the largest in the industrial park -- is assessed by the city at $3.6 million. The 12 acres it sits on is assessed at $2.6 million.

Steve Gottlieb, A&P's chief financial officer, who negotiated the tax deals with the state and city, did not return phone calls Friday.

A website for the company says it owns 12 plants in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, where it launders millions of pounds of laundry weekly for hospitals, nursing homes and other health care facilities. The company, also known as Unitex Textile Rental Services, has been family owned since it began laundering linens for hotels and restaurants about 100 years ago. Its focus shifted to the health care industry in the 1990s, the website says.

Mayor Daniel Rivera said A&P will pay its workers above the state minimum wage, now $12 an hour for most workers and scheduled to increase in phases to $15 an hour by 2023.

"They're good wages with benefits for people who don't have a lot of skills," Rivera said. "This is a job for Lawrence people. People who live outside the city aren't going to come and take them."

A&P likely will find a rich source of customers in the Merrimack Valley, where there are numerous hospitals, including Lawrence General Hospital on the other side of the city from the industrial park, as well as in metro Boston, which has several world-renowned hospitals and is a nationwide center for the pharmaceutical industry. Among other items, A&P rents and launders sheets, blankets, pillowcases, wash cloths, bath towels, and patient and surgical gowns.

Lawrence in recent years has been able to attract new businesses and manufacturers to fill major commercial and industrial spaces when they empty.

The most prominent of the businesses to close over the last few years was Polartec, a textile manufacture at the former Malden Mills site on Broadway on the Methuen line, which shut its 560,000-square-foot plant in 2017 and moved its 200 jobs out of state, including to Tennessee. Jitender Makkar, a California-based real estate broker bought the plant in December for $5.35 million a few months later, with the hope of subdividing it for small manufacturers. Makkar cited his work with the leaders of both Lawrence and Methuen in his decision to launch his business, IndusPAD, here.

Also in 2017, Lawrence Pumps closed a Market Street plant where it made centrifugal pumps for oil refineries that were shipped worldwide, shedding 100 jobs. Century Box, a packaging company whose clients include Table Talk Pies, bought the building with plans to hire 100 workers, but delayed converting the building to the new use so it could be rented to Columbia Gas following the natural gas disaster last year.

In 2016, Showcase Cinemas closed the last of its two movie houses on Turnpike Street, also known as Route 114, on the North Andover line. Ames Prentiss, an owner of a family chain of animal hospitals that includes Bulger Veterinary Hospital in North Andover, bought the property a year or so later and is nearing completion on another veterinary hospital that will replace the one in North Andover. He also put up a separate building on the site for Starbucks, the coffeehouse chain, which opened a restaurant there on Friday.

"When we think about economic gains and losses, we're still far ahead," Rivera said Friday. "We're ahead of the curve on what we've lost in jobs and businesses."

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