Developer’s newest project continues transformation of Jones Falls Valley

Blink and you might miss a nondescript warehouse in the 3300 block of Clipper Mill Road in Hampden.

But David Tufaro and his daughter, Jennifer Nolley, are betting an estimated $22 million that their redevelopment of the 200,000-square-foot structure — with a planned Belvedere Square-type market and a restaurant in the old boiler room — will be a can’t-miss proposition.

In the past three years, Tufaro, of Roland Park, has turned a 19th-century textile mill on Falls Road into Mill No. 1, a mixed-use retail, housing and office complex overlooking the Jones Falls stream. Now, Tufaro’s company, Terra Nova Ventures, hopes to start redeveloping the Civil War-era building at 3300 Clipper Mill Road by this spring.

The high-ceilinged main building, with a chimney visible from Interstate 83, was built in 1865 as the Whitehall Cotton Mill. That would be its name as a complex of 27 market-rate, loft-style apartments, mostly one-bedrooms and studios; a market with 18,000 square feet of rentable space; a 6,300-square-foot restaurant with a mezzanine; and 2,300 square feet of office space, plus a one-story parking garage and a pedestrian bridge for emergency evacuation in case the Jones Falls floods. Electrical transformers will be built on stilts above the 100-year flood plain, Tufaro said.

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