Cole Manley (left) and James Stotler work on the demolition of the 85-foot smoke stack of the former Juniata Silk Mill Thursday. Mirror photo by Patrick Waksmunski

A pair of prospective tenants for the former Juniata Silk Mill have been keeping tabs on renovations to the structure that will enable them to start business operations there soon.

Colin Lennox runs EcoIslands, a for-profit 501(c) limited liability company that conducts research on water pollution issues and designs and builds structures to remediate that sort of pollution.

Ben Hornberger plans to launch Ben’s Bargain Bins, which will resell items purchased from liquidation companies that deal with firms like Amazon, Target, Walmart, Home Depot and Lowe’s.

EcoIslands will be renting a 1,600-square-foot space where Lennox will do plastic welding on large corrugated thermoplastic piping to create cisterns, methane digesters, advanced septic tanks and tanks for treatment of acid mine drainage, Lennox said.

Lennox works out of a home office, where he can build some prototypes, but because the area is not zoned for production, he has had to contract out large production runs — an issue that the coming tenancy at the Mill building will alleviate for his 14-year-old firm.

In a couple of months, when he starts working in the new shop, he’ll be alone, but hopes to have two or three employees within the first year of operation there.

The new site will provide “room to grow,” Lennox said.

He is the beneficiary of an $11,000 grant from the city, from the city’s American Rescue Plan Act funding.

The grant required that he use it in connection with a city address, which the Mill building possesses.

Lennox is a member of a NASA space ecology working group intent on constructing “wetlands for space,” he said.

Ben’s Bargain Bins will be renting a 10,000-square-foot section of the Mill building, according to Hornberger.

It will be Hornberger’s first foray into business.

He’ll buy items by the truckload, then resell them at a steep discount from their initial list retail prices, he said.

Shopping at the store will resemble a “large scale treasure hunt,” he said.

The items he’ll be selling are sent by retailers to liquidators for reasons that include overstock purchases and customer returns — which are less expensive for retailers to liquidate than for them to go through what’s required to replace them on sales shelves, Hornberger said.

He’s modeling the enterprise on stores common in the south, and on a store in Roaring Spring, he said.

“I’m trying to bring something new to Altoona,” he said.

The renovations so far have included demolishing a section of the building front, parallel with Broadway, and a strip in the middle, also parallel to Broadway.

The spaces thus exposed can be used for parking, according to Lennox.

A section was also eliminated that connected the main building with a section in back that houses Press Box Printing, which is now a separate structure, Hornberger said.

The plans for selective demolition to create off-street parking date to at least 2020, when a consulting engineer for then-building owner, the now-deceased Brinton “Rob” Simington, spoke of the plan in the context of a land development approval from the city.

Family members still own the Mill property, according to Hornberger.

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