MANSFIELD — Westinghouse was once a hallmark of prosperity and prominence in Mansfield. But since the manufacturing giant closed in 1990, the factory has sat empty — a testament to what was but never what could be.
Westinghouse’s demise came slowly after decades of downsizing its operations and payroll. By the time the last employees left the line, it was known as Mansfield Products Company. The plant had slowly whittled down to encompass only the laundry division of White-Westinghouse.
When it closed in 1990, there were 643 employees.
The property has since been divided. Of the 16 buildings that once stood on Westinghouse’s 42-acre campus, only two remain.
The original 1918 factory, situated against the railroad tracks at 200 East Fifth Street, went through a handful of owners before Ernie Coffman purchased the building in 2007.
The “H” building at 246 East 4th Street still functions as the Mansfield Commerce Center. It’s used as a records storage building.
Mansfield Business Parks LLC acquired the concrete slab that used to house other Westinghouse buildings in 1999 when a local partnership sold it to them.
For years, Westinghouse was perhaps the largest and most well-known symbol of blight in Mansfield. But former Mansfield Mayor Lydia Reid said it didn’t generate as much concern from citizens when it first closed.
“It just wasn’t one that I had a lot of calls or inquiries about,” said Reid, the city’s former finance director who then served as mayor from 1991 to 2005. “We were working on so many other things in those years.”
As time went on, Mansfielders grew impatient. Much of the Westinghouse structure was removed in 2012 — but the former power plant remained a little while longer.
The property owners tried to demolish the power plant in 2010. The company hired Statewide Mansfield LLC, a Michigan company, to carry out the demolition. Statewide then hired SOS Management and The Afcose Group for pre-demolition removal of asbestos. The work, was never properly done.
“They came in and basically harvested the metal (steel, copper and other valuable metals) and left,” Mansfield Mayor Tim Theaker told Richland Source in 2016.
MBP filed a lawsuit in May 2013 against Statewide, SOS and Afcose and later won a $1.6 million judgement.
The power plant finally came down in 2016.
“It’s been an eyesore for a long time. We (the city) don’t own it, but we’ve put pressure on the owners through the EPA to demolish it because it started caving in in parts,” Theaker said at the time. “And if it ever came down, it would cause dust that is hazardous to health.”
Even though many of the buildings came down, the barren concrete field and dilapidated remains continued to be an eyesore for residents.
Three years ago, Mansfield resident Russell Potter used Richland Source’s Open Source platform to seek answers about the property’s future. He’d wondered about the site’s potential for nearly two decades.
“It’s frustrating to see huge swaths of land being unused, just kind of frozen in time,” Potter told Richland Source in 2018. “It’s just a concrete landscape that is not moving forward.”
Jean Taddie, a former Sixth Ward representative on Mansfield City Council, once described the vacant industrial properties like Westinghouse and Tappan as the ‘elephant in the room.’
“I think it would be a great opportunity to reclaim some of our formerly productive areas,” Taddie said of the Richland County Land Bank’s efforts to perhaps acquire the former Westinghouse factory.
“It’s a part of the flavor when businesses come through or potential new residents come through. I think it definitely leaves an impression,” she said.
“I live over there too, so as a continued resident, I’m very interested in seeing some of our former industrial properties cleaned up and repurposed.”
Taddie said having a plan will be crucial to any clean-up efforts.
“There’s a lot of infrastructure money getting pumped into the system, so it’s good to have shovel-ready projects ready so if they grant us money, we know what we want to do with it,” she’s said.
“When you have a plan about how you want to clean up these areas, it helps to attract funding,” Taddie said.
Reid also sees the Land Bank’s involvement as a potential step forward. She too hopes the Land Bank will be able to use its connections to get the state and federal funding necessary to possibly rehabilitate the site.
“The Land Bank has done an excellent job,” she said. “I think taking it over by the Land Bank will give more opportunities for public and private investment.”
Reid said developments in other parts of the county have only highlighted the need for action.
“It really has become an issue now because Ontario has done such a great job of getting the GM plant down,” she said. “Mansfield really needs to pick it up a bit.
“It’s a wasteland right now.”
