Happy to see a local company purchasing this building on Erie's W 12th Street industrial corridor. Skinner Engine was founded in 1868 and was one of the first and largest manufacturers of steam engines. Glad that this one won't meet the wrecking ball, as far too many massive, old manufacturing complexes in Erie have. It's a drab stretch, but I'm not so sure about the plans to paint it.

Erie's Logistics Plus buys former Skinner Engine factory


- Image: http://www.goerie.com/eries-logistic...ngine-factory#

One of Erie's newer businesses is expanding into an 83-year-old building complex on West 12th Street.

Logistics Plus Inc., based at Union Station and founded in 1996, has purchased the former Skinner Engine Co. factory at 337 W. 12th St.

Logistics Plus will use most of the 80,848 feet of space for warehousing and hopes to lease about 11,000 square feet of that space to other businesses for offices, said Jim Berlin, owner and chief executive of Logistics Plus, which provides logistical and shipping services to companies worldwide.

"Our business is growing," Berlin said. "It is a good, solid building, and it is in a good location."

Skinner Engine, founded as a steam engine company in 1868, was Erie County's oldest business when it filed for bankruptcy in 2001.

Berlin said he wants to have the former Skinner Engine Co. factory painted with eye-catching colors in a European style.

"We'll do the bright colors on the front, probably a mural on the east wall (there's a big billboard on the west wall)," Berlin said in an e-mail. "But even the painting on the front is more than painting. It will call up the fishermen houses of Copenhagen."