If you would have stood at the corner of Mascher & Oxford just a few years ago, you would have been standing in front of a giant vacant lot, with views of a battered lamp factory as you looked to the east. Standing in the same place today provides a very different view, with ten homes having been built on the 100 block of W. Oxford Street and the lamp factory converted into Oxford Mills, an apartment and non-profit office building. And there's a pretty sweet coffee shop over there, too.
While the ten homes in the photo above made a dent in the vacant lot that we mentioned above, it's still pretty empty, considering its size. Part of the lot is being used for parking, while the rest sits empty aside from some older homes. But not for long, it seems.
Zoning notices posted to the property indicate that the owners are looking to building eight new homes on this lot. This strikes us as a little odd, since they subdivided the property into ten buildable lots over the summer, including separating out a roughly 7,000 sqft lot at the corner. We'd have to think that the plan now going to the ZBA is an altered version of that concept, which will leave us wondering about what's eventually coming to the corner. But you can probably assume it'll be more homes, eventually. Given the residential development on the block and in the surrounding neighborhood, we don't see why this project would be a problem for anybody.
Speaking of projects on the block, this seems like as good a time as any to check in 1508 Mascher St., the former home of Spencer Industries. It was about a year ago that we told you that developers had purchased this property and were planning to reuse part of the building to create 22 new apartments. This reuse plan came to pass after the developers worked with the community, pivoting from an original plan to demo the whole building. You can see in the image above, there isn't much visible progress for the project at this point, but permits have been winding their way through the system and it appears that the project is on pace to move forward. We'll be interested to keep watch on this block and see which project gets finished first. Who wants to wager?