A seven-year-long search for a new home ended Wednesday when Merchants Terminal Corp. broke ground on a new 155,000-square-foot refrigerated distribution center adjacent to the Seagirt Terminal of the Helen Delich Bentley Port of Baltimore.
The company has operated refrigerated warehouses in Baltimore since 1928, and will handle a wide variety of frozen food products at the new facility. The location will also serve as the family’s corporate headquarters, and is scheduled for completion in July 2009.
“You’ve got the direct connection to Seagirt, you’ve got the rail [transportation], you’ve got the highway [Interstate 95] right there, so you’ve got all modes of transportation,” said company President Harry Halpert.
The $25 million distribution center will rise as part of the Chesapeake Commerce Center on Holabird Avenue, 140 acres of industrial land where General Motors’ van assembly plant once stood.
Ironically, groundbreaking on the new building comes as the company’s original headquarters on Monument Street is in the process of being torn down. Merchants has facilities in Highlandtown, Jessup, Landover, and Wilmington, Del., but has sought a location near the port for several years.
Several potential sites were identified, only for the company to, “lose out to commercial development — or the prospect of commercial development,” Halpert said.
The current site was purchased from Duke Realty, and will allow the company the direct access to the port that it desired, said LeRoy Hoffberger, chairman of Hoffberger Holdings Inc., Merchants’ parent company.
“Being located adjacent to Seagirt will benefit our family and the Port of Baltimore,” Hoffberger said.
The private investment comes as the port mulls leasing the Seagirt Terminal to a private operator, a move Halpert said the company supports. Private operation would allow for flexibility the state government’s Maryland Port Administration does not have, he said.
The port’s namesake, Helen Delich Bentley, drew parallels to the city’s early days, when investors such as Enoch Pratt and Johns Hopkins drove development.
“Each of those entrepreneurs invested their own funds … and left behind their legacies which have continued for 200 years,” she said.
