Landmark Messer St. building sold

LACONIA — The landmark building at the corner of Oak and Messer streets, which has housed a car dealership, a soda bottling facility and a laundry business, has sold after sitting vacant for more than a decade.

The building at 128 Messer St., originally constructed in 1934, will have space for two businesses. The new owner, Mike McCarthy of MTMcCarthy Realty Holdings, LLC, said he purchased the property to create a 9,500-square-foot space for a tenant, an electrical supply company, and to offer the remaining 6,500 square feet for another use.

McCarthy, who also owns a commercial space at the corner of Fair and Court streets, said he will have to perform interior renovations in order to create a retail space for CD Electrical, which is currently operating in Gilford. However, he said that the building is in fairly good condition, given its age and the fact that it’s been many years since it was regularly occupied.

“It was always maintained,” McCarthy said. “It’s just an older building that we’re going to rehabilitate.”

He added that the exterior of the color will get a paint job, “It won’t be red any more.”

The electrical supplier will be at least the fourth business to occupy the building. Debbie Frawley Drake, who sold the building to McCarthy, said that the building was first built as a car dealership – the large, white panels on the exterior used to be windows into the showroom. Then it was operated as a Coca-Cola bottling facility for many years, and she still hears from people who remember watching the bottles spin past those windows as they went through the assembly line. Frawley Drake said she purchased the building in 2004 as a warehouse for Lakes Region Linens, a business her father had started in 1970.

The Messer Street building proved its worth four years later, the family business’s main facility on Opechee Street was leveled in a fire in September of 2008. It was a Thursday night, she recalled, and all the trucks were loaded for their Friday morning deliveries. The company was able to get back up and running on Messer Street without missing a beat, she said.

“We didn’t lose a single customer,” she said. “The building was good to me.”

Lakes Region Linen was sold in 2009, and since then, the property was only used sporadically as winter boat storage. That will change now that CD Electrical is moving in.

“I’m very happy to see it has a new use,” Frawley Drake said, noting that it was a difficult building to market. “We had lots of people interested, but it’s so many square feet, it took the right kind of business to go in.”