2010 Buyers Guide - Broadband Properties

The Residences at
Oella Mill, Md.
By Joe Bousquin ■ Contributing Editor,
Broadband Properties
This month, the spotlight is on Oella Mill, a historic rehab on the site of what once was America’s largest textile
mill. Renovated by Southern Management and wired with fiber by Verizon, the deployment represents cutting-edge
technology implemented in a centuries-old setting. Our thanks to Southern’s John Cohan and Verizon’s Glenn Hilley
for their assistance in preparing this article.
Time has never moved quickly in Oella, Md. A tiny hamlet
perched above the Patapsco River, just across the river
from historic Ellicott City and west of Baltimore, the
town has been tied to the textile industry since Colonial times
and didn’t have a modern sewage system until 1984. After
Oella’s historic mill, first built in 1808, shut down for good in
1972, the town languished for nearly three decades.
Recently, the pace of life has picked up considerably. The
village’s quaintness, along with encouragement from community
leaders, sparked new interest in redevelopment. One of
the largest projects has been the Residences at Oella Mill, a
147-unit luxury apartment community in the town’s old mill
building. Undertaken by Southern Management, a Vienna,
Va.–based firm with more than 25,000 units throughout the
mid-Atlantic, the project included a complete overhaul of the
mill, which was last rebuilt in 1918 after a fire destroyed the
original structure.
Amenities include designer kitchens with stainless-steel
appliances, concierge service, a two-level fitness center and
weight room, a billiards room and even a library with Wi-Fi,
printer and fax machine. The building’s exterior was left intact
to put its history on display, but the interior is a model of modern
luxury living, all the way down to the technology inside
the walls. Residents living on a site named for the first woman
to spin cotton in America now enjoy fiber-enabled triple-play
services from Verizon with data speeds up to 50 Mbps, ondemand
video choices and in-unit telephony options. On top
of all that, to ensure that residents get crystal-clear cellular reception
in their units, Verizon Wireless set up a 3G cellular
distributed antenna system within the building.
We talked to Glenn Hilley, Verizon’s manager of network
engineering in the Maryland and Washington, D.C., region,
28 | BROADBAND PROPERTIES | www.broadbandproperties.com | November/December 2009