York College Renovates the Home of Red Tape

York Narrow Fabrics will become an engineering facility. (Photograph courtesy York College of Pennsylvania)

Here’s a case of adaptive reuse that even a bureaucrat could love: York College of Pennsylvania is refurbishing a manufacturing facility once owned by the York Narrow Fabrics Company, whose mainstay for decades was producing spools of red woven fabric — or “red tape” — used to wrap government documents. The building will become a home for the college’s engineering disciplines.

The plant, which sits adjacent York College’s campuses, produced a million yards of fabric tape every day during its years of operation, which ended two years ago. The fabric tape manufactured there, in various colors and widths, had innumerable uses, explains Carlton H. Stauffer, who was the longtime president of York Narrow Fabrics. It lined the insides of business suits and formed borders on mattresses and flags. Soldiers in the army used York tape to mark walking paths through mine fields. A morgue in Milwaukee used the stuff to tie up body parts. A big account for the company was in making tape that formed loops on skirts, used to hang the garments. When women started wearing slacks and hangers started featuring clamps, “that really hurt us,” Mr. Stauffer said.

The company saw its sales peak at $3.5-million in the mid-1980s, but revenue fell over the past 20 years. Mr. Stauffer said that he watched York College grow up all around his business, and when the time came to sell the building, he turned down other offers to sell to the college for $1.2-million.

“They wanted the property for a long time, and I wanted them to have the property for a long time,” he said. “I had no connection to the college. I liked them, I was proud of them, and I enjoyed watching their success. Our little property turned out to be a keystone connecting the West and East campus.”

LSC Design, a York firm, is handling the $7-million 47,000-square-foot renovation project. When it is finished this fall, the building will feature various laboratories, classrooms, and computer clusters; a student commons; offices; and a machine shop and fabrication area, which will feature common space where students from different engineering disciplines can work on projects together. —Scott Carlson

An architect’s rendering of how the building will look after renovation (Courtesy York College of Pennsylvania)