Arlington gets the Works

Published 9:00 pm Friday, January 14, 2005

EVERETT – American Boiler Works, a company that called Everett home for 100 years, has moved to Arlington.

Friday was the last day for the remnants of an office staff at the old facility at 111 13th St.

“I’ll miss the Everett waterfront,” Betty Hanley, the company’s finance and administrative director, said earlier this week. “I worked there so many years. But we landed in a good place in Arlington. I think that will be good for us.”

American Boiler didn’t go willingly. It was forced to move as part of a redevelopment of the Port of Everett’s north marina area.

A number of other industrial tenants have also been forced to find new homes to make way for a $200 million project that will involve condos, retail shops, offices, public walkways and an amphitheater.

The company helped build the sawmills that once lined the Everett waterfront and which gave it the moniker “City of Smokestacks.”

Since then, it’s made everything from tourist submarines for use in Hawaii to oil drilling rigs sent to Alaska’s North Slope.

Today, Hanley said, it does a lot of work for the Hanford nuclear reservation making canisters for hazardous waste, and making equipment for companies such as Boeing.

The work has helped the metal fabricator prosper during a time when many such companies have gone out of business. Hanley said. American Boiler employs about 100 people.

“We’re kind of an oddity here in the Pacific Northwest,” Hanley said. “It’s unusual to have a fabricator of our size here.

The new location at 6720 191st Place NE has 5 acres, which should help the company grow. And the move has helped the company reorganize things to work more efficiently.

But it hasn’t been easy.

Hanley said the company had to cut back on staff to afford the move, which involved relocating large equipment that had been embedded at the old space. And scheduling the move to allow the company to continue to work efficiently was a juggling act.

“It’s not an inexpensive venture to take a company in place all those years and re-create that,” she said.

Hanley said she had hoped for more financial assistance from the port. “We provided jobs and tax dollars to the city of Everett for many, many years,” she said.

.She hopes the north marina development will provide some equally good positions. “A lot of industrial tenants have been gone from the Everett waterfront,” Hanley said. “I hope their jobs are replaced by equal or better-paying jobs.”