‘Topping off’ ceremony marks milestone for Leominster police station project

David Dore, Leominster Champion
·2 min read
The final vertical beam, with a traditional pine tree sitting on top, is lifted into place during a “topping off” ceremony for the new Leominster police station April 25. The beam was signed by members of the Leominster City Council, Police Station Building Committee and the Police Department, along with Leominster Mayor Dean Mazzarella.
The final vertical beam, with a traditional pine tree sitting on top, is lifted into place during a “topping off” ceremony for the new Leominster police station April 25. The beam was signed by members of the Leominster City Council, Police Station Building Committee and the Police Department, along with Leominster Mayor Dean Mazzarella.

LEOMINSTER — The city's Police Department is a little over a year away from moving into its new home and Leominster Police Chief Aaron Kennedy said it will be “long overdue.”

Construction of the new police station on Central Street reached a milestone April 25, when the final vertical beam was lifted into place during a “topping off” ceremony.

The beam was signed by members of the Leominster City Council, Police Station Building Committee and the Police Department, along with Mayor Dean Mazzarella.

“All the steel’s up, which is pretty impressive,” Kennedy said. “It’s very promising. It was pretty amazing to watch them put up the iron. It was like an Erector set.”

Now that the metal skeleton is up, work will shift to the outer shell and inside of the 30,000-square-foot, three-story building.

A small crowd gathered at the site of the new Leominster police station on Central Street April 25 for a “topping off” ceremony.
A small crowd gathered at the site of the new Leominster police station on Central Street April 25 for a “topping off” ceremony.

“It’s really going to transform right before our eyes,” Kennedy said.

The new police station will be located at 106-124 Central St., encompassing what had been a three-family home, the Whitton Insurance Co., a real estate office, the E.F. Dodge Paper Box Co. (later the Gariepy Furniture warehouse), the Lincoln School on Cross Street, and a single-family house on Lancaster Street.

The building will have plenty of space for city Police Department and its officers. It will also address deficiencies in the current headquarters built in 1959 at 29 Church St., such as a larger locker room, multiple interview rooms, an amphitheater for meetings, a foyer that complies with the federal Americans with Disabilities Act and a records office just off the lobby.

'Built for the future'

“This building now is built for the future,” Mazzarella said during an episode of his public access TV show “Inside Leominster” last month. “It’s built for a safer environment for prisoners, as well as the police officers that are in there. It’s much more professional, much more public access, so we’re not bringing through people through the entire building when we just needed to sit with them and meet them for 10 or 15 minutes … professional in terms of having cameras when we have to interview people.”

The project will cost an estimated $28 million to $30 million, Mazzarella said at its ceremonial groundbreaking in October.

Discussions about building a new police station go back to at least the 1980s, but that talk shifted into concrete action in the last several years, including a couple of feasibility studies, the purchase of the land on Central Street and Lancaster Street in 2018, the demolition of buildings in 2020, and the drawing-up of plans.

The project is expected to be completed next spring, according to Kennedy, with a possible opening day of June 6, 2023.

“It’s going to be great,” Kennedy said on Mazzarella’s TV show last month. “I can’t wait for that day. It’d be a great ribbon cutting to go to.”

This article originally appeared on Leominster Champion: ‘Topping off’ marks milestone for Leominster police station project