Blood work drawn by EDIC

LYNN – The city?s economic development agency will contract an architect to begin planning $804,000 in repairs to the J.B. Blood Building.Located on Wheeler Street near the Lynn YMCA, the building is owned by the Economic Development and Industrial Corporation and has not seen “a significant investment” since the 1980s, said EDIC Executive Director James Cowdell.Cowdell said the four-story building?s roof is in good shape and regularly inspected, but the brick and masonry walls leak during wind-driven rains and some of the more than 100 windows in the building are broken.?It?s tired and needs attention,” said Gordon R. Hall, president of the building?s management firm, The Hall Company, Inc.Walls and broken windows are not the Blood building?s only problems: Hall and Cowdell said the J.B. Blood?s metal doors, concrete interior staircases and aging linoleum floors are unattractive to visitors.Tenants include JOI Day Care Center, Extras for Creative Reuse and the Lynn Family Success Center opened last November as a partnership between Lynn Housing Authority & Neighborhood Development and the United Way.According to its website, EDIC is advertising three spaces on its second, third and fourth floors for lease. Each space measures 6,000 square feet.Grocery store chain owner Josiah B. Blood constructed the building in 1908 as his “Beehive Bakery” and expanded the building over the decades. Damaged by fire in 1974, the Blood building became a site for city efforts to find new homes for businesses burned out in the Great Lynn Fire of 1981. EDIC helped pay for the building?s renovation into an “industrial incubator facility” in 1983.Cowdell said J.B. Blood tenants collectively pay EDIC $30,000 per month in rents.?It creates jobs and creates revenue,” he said.EDIC attorney Paul Keating told board members on Tuesday that current low borrowing rates put EDIC in a favorable position to finance the building?s renovation.