Who Wants To Live In A Former Hershey Chocolate Bean Silo?

Home sweet home?

Last year, mega-choco-corp Hershey’s closed its longtime factory and moved operations to a new facility. There’s a limited market for massive chocolate factories, and most of the site has been torn down to have new, non-candy-related things built on it. One relic of the factory that will stay is the row of massive cocoa bean silos, which have new owners and are going to become…something.

The silos were mostly built in 1950, and a third of them were added in 1957, the Patriot-News reports. The current owners have removed all of the electric and industrial equipment, but are looking for an experienced developer to do the actual development part.

The new owners bought the site from Hershey for $100,000 two years ago, but they still don’t quite know what to do with it. There is a lot of space, including a cavernous top floor that would make a wonderful restaurant or penthouse. One idea proposed is a condominium development. The site could also work as a hotel (it’s near the Hersheypark amusement park, after all) or house a rock-climbing wall. One local group proposed an industrial museum. The silos are big enough to fit all of those things, really: they could hold ninety million pounds of cocoa beans.

Want to live in Hershey’s cocoa bean silos? Developer sought to transform chocolate-making icons [PennLive]

by Laura Northrup via Consumerist