Custom Marine Inc of Old Saybrook

 

Some places pull you in not because they demand attention, but because they quietly dare you to remember. One sweltering afternoon, under the kind of heat that turns asphalt into tar and makes you rethink your footwear, J and I found ourselves wandering the overgrown path that led to Building #1 off Boston Post Road. We'd been here before, not this exact structure, but to others like it. Long-forgotten corners of America, where time has folded in on itself and memory clings to dust-covered rafters.

The grass brushed against our jeans as we trudged toward the building, the humidity so thick it felt like a second skin. Outside, the world was summer in full throttle. Inside, we stepped into a different kind of atmosphere, dark, silent, cool in a way that wasn’t refreshing, just... dead. The kind of dead that had settled in long ago and made peace with itself.

This building, like so many others we've explored over the years, had slipped through the cracks of time. It wasn’t abandoned in a cinematic sense; there was no dramatic collapse, no visible tragedy. It had simply been left behind. Yet, curiously, it hadn’t been emptied. The current owner stored a life’s worth of possessions behind, a strange inventory that told fragments of a story without offering the full plot.

Against one wall rested a purple dune buggy, sun-faded and dust-kissed, its tires flat but its posture still defiant, as if it had once lived for speed. Nearby, lathes and heavy drilling machinery, once worth their weight in precision and productivity, stood like quiet sentinels, waiting for instructions that would never come. The air was tinged with the pungency of mildew and forgotten paper, as rows of palletized boxes crumbled beneath the slow encroachment of rot.

The machines that once gave the building its purpose were long gone. Whatever industry had taken root here had long since been uprooted. There were no plaques, no signs, no ledgers left to trace the arc of its story. Just one faint echo: a benign Red Sox calendar from 2001, still pinned to the wall. 

We didn’t venture into the other buildings that day. Some were still in use, occupied by tenants running more current chapters of commerce. Others seemed sealed tight, requiring more effort, and more intent, than we were willing to offer. But this one had been open. Not literally, perhaps, but symbolically. It had been waiting.

Before the hum of machines echoed through the walls of Building #1, before the scent of grease and iron mingled with stale paper and sun-baked concrete, 330 Boston Post Road was just another piece of Connecticut farmland. For decades, it lay undeveloped, a patch of quiet earth nestled off the old highway. But by the late 1960s, that began to change.

What rose from that soil was more than a single building. Alongside the long, flat structure now known as Building #1, at least three open pits were carved into the ground directly to the east. Their purpose remains unclear, but their past presence still hints at the scale of the ambitions that shaped the site.

In the early days, it was Cerro-Flex Products, a division of Cerro Wire and Cable, that laid claim to the property. From the late 1960s into the early ’70s, the company produced flexible cables and circuits, quietly, methodically, and precisely. It didn’t last long. By 1970, a new occupant had taken over, one that would define the property for the next three decades: Custom Marine Inc, also known as Custom Marine Inc Precision Marine & Aerospace Products. 

Custom Marine wasn’t your average shop. From aircraft to submarines to high-end yachts, it built specialized components for some of the most demanding industries in the world. This wasn’t mass production. It was intricate, specialized work, the kind of manufacturing that required skill, focus, and a deep understanding of engineered systems.

Building #1 at 330 Boston Post Road became a hub, but it wasn’t the only one. By 1977, Custom Marine had expanded into Building #4 at 332 Boston Post Road, and eventually into 342 Boston Post Road as well. Each location had its role, but 342 in particular stood out: it was where the heavy work took place, including the assembly and testing of massive industrial ball valves, components critical to controlling the flow of fluids in large-scale systems.

By the time the new millennium arrived, however, the hum had quieted. Custom Marine ceased operations sometime around 2000, leaving behind a physical legacy but no clear successor. For the next 25 years, Building #1 served not as a production facility, but as a storage site. The property owner filled it with machinery and vehicles, some collectible, some purely practical. Nothing new was made here, but nothing was thrown away either.

Building #4, meanwhile, transitioned into new hands. First came Blast All Inc., a welding outfit that carried on the site’s industrial DNA. After them, Sali Cartel leased the space to store vehicles for its limousine service, a quieter, more commercial use, but one that still kept the lights on. There are whispers that Manafort Brothers, a construction firm with deep regional roots, may have briefly occupied the site as well, but records are murky in that aspect.

As of May 24, 2025, the demolition crews moved in and demolished its very existence. What was once a humming industrial enclave along Boston Post Road has now been torn down, to make way for something entirely new: a vision of transit-oriented development and housing that the town of Old Saybrook has been chasing for over a decade.

It’s the final chapter for the industrial property that once housed Custom Marine Inc., a manufacturing mainstay that helped define this corridor’s identity through much of the late 20th century. But that identity, blue-collar, hard-wired, and unapologetically mechanical, has long since faded. The buildings lingered as relics, filled not with laborers but with leftover possessions. 

The town’s ambition to reimagine this stretch of Route 1 isn’t new. Back in 2014, Old Saybrook adopted a plan to breathe life into the corridor between Saybrook Junction and Ferry Point, branding it "Mariner’s Way." The name was more than a nod to its nautical past; it was a gesture toward what could be, a corridor that linked not just roads, but communities, and reflected a modern vision for mixed-use living and economic vitality.

To guide that vision, the town hired CivicMoxie, a Massachusetts-based planning consultancy, to develop strategies for reclaiming the 17.84-acre site near the I-95 off-ramp, once been the core of Custom Marine’s operations and had quickly become the focal point. Vacant, vast, and visible, it was a canvas begging for reinvention.

Still, plans alone don’t build neighborhoods. Over the years, the concept of Mariner’s Way became something of a local ghost story: always talked about, never quite materializing. The economic tides didn’t help. From shifting market conditions to the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic, the ground beneath development dreams seemed to shift as often as the weather.

By 2024, it became clear that good intentions needed sharper tools. The town commissioned Camoin Associates to deliver a strategic redevelopment plan, this time grounded not just in aesthetic vision, but in economic reality. Their directive was clear: reevaluate, recalibrate, and come up with a blueprint that could be built.

This latest plan acknowledges what’s changed in the last ten years, particularly the rising demand for housing in coastal towns like Old Saybrook and the shifting habits of a post-pandemic population. It outlines public-private partnerships, identifies grant opportunities for environmental cleanup, and emphasizes transit connectivity as a critical lever for revitalization. In short, it’s a plan built not on nostalgia, but on data.

And yet, even the most thorough strategy lives or dies by the alignment of financing, political will, and timing. Until the numbers line up and a developer breaks ground, Mariner’s Way remains at least in part a hopeful sketch. Whether what rises in its place fulfills the promise of Mariner’s Way or becomes another plan paused by economic downturn remains to be seen.

As with so many American towns at a crossroads, Old Saybrook is now tasked with answering a familiar question: Can vision become reality before momentum fades? Or will this be another corridor where potential and progress pass each other in the dark?

Time, as always, will tell.

Source(s):

1. CT Examiner. (2023, July 18). Old Saybrook reboots Mariners Way, hires consultant to draft fresh strategic plan. https://ctexaminer.com/2023/07/18/old-saybrook-reboots-mariners-way-hires-consultant-to-draft-fresh-strategic-plan/