The “wow factor” and room to grow led Reliance Bank to sign on as the first tenant of The Mill near the former Bon Secours hospital campus.

Reliance Bank will move its headquarters there early next year from its 1119 12th St. location.

Asked about the building’s appeal, Altoona Blair County Development Corp. CEO Steve McKnight spread his hands, palms up, as if to say — “just look!”

Behind and above him on the fourth floor of the 130-year-old former factory known as the “silk mill” were wide windows, exposed brick, bare wooden roof planks and enormous wood trusses — providing the kind of retro modern aesthetic that qualifies as Class A office space, according to McKnight.

“It’s stunning,” McKnight said of the room where the news conference was held. “It’s the No. 1 office asset in the area.”

The building’s “wow factor” helped lure Reliance to commit to moving its headquarters, McKnight said.

The bank’s current headquarters, which the firm has occupied since 1953, is configured mainly with separate offices, which doesn’t lend itself to easy communication or the sharing of ideas among employees, according to bank spokeswoman April Reilly.

There was also limited potential for growth there, a problem to which limited parking contributes, said Reliance CEO Phil Freeman.

The 20,000 square feet at the Mill, comprising the second, third and fourth floors of the L-shaped facility’s short leg, is actually smaller than the downtown space, Freeman said.

But the open layout at The Mill will allow for interior design that permits employees to work “more effectively with one another,” Freeman said.

The company entered the lease with the Mill owners in hopes the space will provide enough flexibility to serve the bank for at least the next two decades, Freeman said.

There are 42 workers in the bank’s current headquarters, and initial plans are to bring 45 workers to the new figs — including three from the bank’s 17th Street location, Freeman said.

The current empty space that the bank will occupy at The Mill would accommodate as many as 20 additional workers, Freeman said.

The build out of that space will likely be based on modular principles, with a premium on letting in as much natural light for as many employees as possible, and on retaining their view of the brickwork, the planking, the trusses and the beams, Freeman said.

He doesn’t intend to install drop ceilings.

“We want to try to keep the aesthetics,” he said.

Most of the structural wood is yellow pine, although some of the planking is Tsuga spruce, said Randy Diviney, the structural engineer for the renovation project conducted by the owners, Silk Mill Properties Inc.

The wood and the interior brick walls were stripped of paint by sponge blasting, which enables operators to control how much they’re taking off, Diviney said.

Because the property is in the city’s Local Economic Revitalization Tax Assistance zone, Reliance is getting some tax benefit on the lease, Freeman said.

One might imagine there would be a major contrast between the new space as a setting for pleasant office work vs. the old textile factory atmosphere.

The silk mill began in 1889, when George Frost & Sons of Paterson, N.J., began building the complex, followed by its takeover two years later by Schwarzenbach-Huber & Co. of Switzerland, followed by Puritan Sportswear in 1932, and finally Warnaco, which closed the factory in 1991.

The facility was actually run in benevolent fashion, according to local historian Michael Farrow, who recently completed a book on the property.

Mostly women and children were employed there at first, until child-labor laws eliminated the latter source of workers around the end of World War I, Farrow said.

But the mill wasn’t “grimy,” Farrow said.

Based on pictures from that time, things were kept “very clean” and the floors even shined, he said.

Schwarzenbach-Huber built kitchen facilities, a cafeteria and a park on the grounds where the workers could eat lunch in summer, he said.

It also held annual picnics.

“They wanted to make things nicer for people,” Farrow said. “It was an enlightened approach.”

Reliance will work with ABCD on finding a new use for the bank’s existing down headquarters property, which the bank owns, according to Freeman.

“All options are on the table,” for that building — including both renovation and new construction, commercial uses and housing, McKnight said.

Mirror Staff Writer William Kibler is at 814-949-7038.