Blighted area of Woodlawn gets boost from One Stop Environmental’s growing business
When fast-growing One Stop Environmental outgrew its home on First Avenue North, the environmental services firm found its new home in a pretty obvious place: across the street.
The firm, owned by Shannon Riley, decided to invest in the blighted Woodlawn area rather than move to a suburban area of Birmingham.
In late 2008, the company, which provides hazardous waste remediation and cleanup services for government, military and private sector clients, announced plans to purchase and redevelop several adjacent buildings in the area.
One Stop utilized the city’s new stimulus loan program through Operation New Birmingham to make the project possible. The company requested $629,000 from the city for the project, which will also allow the company to more than double its staff to 100.
“This is a direct avenue into the city and right now there is a lot of mixed-use along that road, a lot of warehouses, houses, businesses, as well as a bunch of abandoned offices and houses and churches,” said Cherri Pitts, owner of Studio C Architecture & Interiors, which handled design work for the project.
“It’s really depressed. There is just nothing happening there.”
The property at 4801 1st Ave. N. wasn’t making things any better.
“It sat vacant for quite a while and it was vandalized in the kind of way that doesn’t even make sense, people taking bats to it, people pulling off the roof to get inside, air conditioning units with just nothing left to them,” Pitts said.
Her new plan for the space would dramatically elevate the design standard for the site.
“A big part of what we want to do is to put a new face on the building, to give it curb appeal,” she said.
That will include a new finish to the facade, new roof, new draining, putting in new windows, new walls and landscaping – all things to make it exciting.
“This project has some of the scale of larger office building, but the details in the lighting, the landscape, all those things will tone down this massive chunk of building and help it bring together the residential and the business side of the area,” she said.
