Virjune Manufacturing Co: Inside Waterbury's Vacant Factory

The surviving red brick front of the Virjune plant seen from across the street, almost entirely screened by trees, vines and knotweed. A tall square opening in the brickwork still holds its steel window frame but no glass, and the roofline above it is open to the sky. A power line crosses overhead and the road runs empty across the foreground.
A narrow cinder block passage running away from the camera, the walls painted pale green to waist height and covered above that in spray paint, a large yellow and blue piece on the right hand wall. The ceiling has burned and collapsed, letting daylight and a tangle of charred joists through. A white enamel bathtub stands on its pedestal in the middle of the passage, surrounded by ash and broken boards.

J and I were already having a rough day. We'd just driven across town to check out an old industrial site he hadn't visited in a while, only to find it erased. Nothing left but a slab of concrete and chain-link fence.

So we took a detour. Sometimes you salvage a disappointing afternoon with a backup plan, even if you're just ticking a box.

The former Virjune plant hides in plain sight off Thomaston Avenue. If you drive past in summer, you'll miss it completely. Trees and shrubs swallow the building whole, nature reclaiming what industry left behind. Come winter, though, when the branches go bare and the world turns gray, the red brick skeleton reveals itself. Even then, you have to know where to look.

A wide interior bay with the roof almost entirely gone. Rusted steel trusses and purlins cross overhead against open sky, rows of steel columns run back into the building, and the low walls are painted green beneath a band of graffiti. The floor is a mat of charred boards, fallen conduit and grass growing up through the debris.
Looking up into the remains of the roof structure. Heavily pitted and scaled steel I-beams cross one another, shredded timber planks hang from the purlins, and daylight comes through the gaps between the remaining roof deck. A conduit and a length of pipe run along the beam at right.
Two Sanborn fire insurance sheets set side by side, both numbered 239 for Waterbury, Connecticut, Volume 2. On the left, the 1922 survey, with the block north of Welch Street filled by The American Pin Co. (Mutual Risk) in pink, its plating, picking, annealing and foot press rooms, safety pin and hook and eye departments, foundry and store houses labelled building by building, the Naugatuck River at lower left and the New York, New Haven and Hartford tracks running up the middle. On the right, the same sheet updated to February 1950, the complex relabelled Scovill Mfg Co, Waterville Divn, with numbered factory buildings, Waterville Mfg Co making screw machine products on Stevens Street, and a small blue block marked Stamping Wks on the south side of Chapel Street.

I pulled up old Sanborn maps to trace the building's history. The earliest tenant was an auto body shop in 1922. By February 1950, something bigger had moved in. The map labels it simply "Stamping Wks." No company name. No flourish. Just function.

That namelessness felt strange. This was Waterbury's Waterville section, practically in the shadow of the massive Scovill Manufacturing Company plant on Stevens Street, the former American Pin Company complex that once employed thousands. Everyone knew Scovill. But this stamping works? Anonymous.

Eventually, the site became home to Virjune Manufacturing Company. They made the small, essential things: cosmetic packaging, screws and eyelets for lamps, precision parts for machines. Die and grinding work for other manufacturers. The kind of products you never think about until you need them.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Virjune was acquired by VCA, which at the time went by Metal Fabrication. The operation changed hands and names like a game of industrial musical chairs: Eyelet Design, Specialty Packaging, Owens-Brockway. I pieced this timeline together not from corporate records or historical societies, but from obituaries. Dozens of them, scattered across decades. People who spent entire careers there, who retired under one name or another, whose lives were shaped by work inside those red brick walls.

The parent company, Eyelet Design Inc, still does business in Waterbury. But this particular plant, the one off Thomaston Avenue, has been empty since at least 1989. More than three decades of silence.

Looking into a collapsed section of the building. Fallen rafters and splintered planks fill the frame at every angle, a sapling has grown up through the middle of the wreck, and daylight and green leaves show through the hole where the roof gave way. A white toilet bowl lies among the boards in the lower left corner.
Two cyclone dust collectors standing on a rusted steel frame in heavy summer growth, seen through a screen of saplings and vines. The nearer cone is painted pale grey and tagged in yellow, the farther one is bare rust, and both taper down to hoppers above cross-braced legs set on concrete pads.
The length of a factory bay, cinder block wall at left with graffiti and a steel sash window, green painted columns down the middle, and above them a rusted roof deck broken open to the sky with vines hanging through. The floor is thick with charred boards and fallen debris, and the far end of the building is bright with daylight and green growth coming in through the open walls.

What's left now barely counts as a building. The roof is gone. Rain and snow fall straight through to the floor. Metal cylinder pots, relics of some production process, sit rusting beneath a tangle of brush and saplings. Trees grow where workers once stood.

Whether the site will ever be cleaned up and marketed to developers is anyone's guess. For now, it remains what so many old factory towns know well: a question mark made of brick, a piece of the past that nobody quite knows what to do with.

A close view of the two cyclone collectors from below, the pale grey cone at left tagged in yellow with the word CHAPEL sprayed across the square chute beneath it, the rusted cone at right pierced through in places. Diagonal steel bracing crosses the frame, and the concrete footings and curb of the old slab are visible in the leaf litter below.
Looking up at the cyclone collectors through a screen of branches and vines, their grey casings streaked with rust. An expanded metal catwalk and handrail run between them at the upper level, with ductwork turning off to the right and the whole structure half buried in the tree canopy.
📋 Reader Records
🏭 Did you punch in at 44 Chapel Street?

If you or someone in your family worked in this building — under Virjune Manufacturing, VCA, Metal Fabrication, Eyelet Design, Specialty Packaging or Owens-Brockway — the record of it is thin enough that one shoebox would change it. Pay stubs, union cards, a shop photograph, a product catalogue, or just a memory of the Waterville section when the place still had a roof. The research could not establish which company ran the stamping works the 1950 Sanborn map leaves nameless, what the two cyclone collectors behind the building served, or the year the last shift actually walked out. Full credit given to all contributors.

⬇️ Keep Reading
🏭 More Forgotten Connecticut Factories
Two more Waterbury sites first — one cleaned up, one still waiting — then the button works, a Plainfield mill, a pin company and an organ factory.
🔗 Mattatuck Manufacturing Company What happens when a Waterbury brownfield does get cleaned up. Organized October 15, 1896 with $225,000 in capital, shut in 1992, demolished around 2002, and remediated at a cost near $6 million before a senior center opened on the site in 2013. › 🏭 Former Anamet Manufacturing Complex The biggest brownfield on the city's list, at 698 South Main Street. Part of the same Benedict & Burnham brass legacy, and the future Naugatuck River Greenway is routed straight through it. › 🔘 Waterbury Button Company The tiny brass empire that dressed America, from the Titanic to Army uniforms. The works burned in May 2023, and a 2016 survey found PCBs, lead and mercury in the soil. › 🏚️ Abandoned InterRoyal: Plainfield's Toxic Legacy A Plainfield mill that once employed hundreds, reduced to broken windows, fire and an industrial obituary. › 📌 Star Pin Company Shelton CT: An Insider Look James C. Hubbard built a hairpin machine; his son Henry designed the machines that made the first bobby pins. Fire gutted the Canal Street works on June 13, 2020, mid-conversion. › 🎵 Bridgeport Organ Company: From Music to Decay An imposing Railroad Avenue structure that stood vacant for years. Half of it is now school space and apartments, and the developer is still fighting the city over the rest. ›
🏭 An auto body shop stood here in 1922. By February 1950 the Sanborn map showed a stamping works on the site with no company name attached to it. The plant later became Virjune Manufacturing Company, making cosmetic packaging, screws and eyelets in Waterbury's Waterville section, and passed through VCA, Metal Fabrication, Eyelet Design, Specialty Packaging and Owens-Brockway. It has stood empty since at least 1989, and the roof is gone.

Source(s):

  1. (1922) Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Waterbury, New Haven County, Connecticut. Sanborn Map Company, Vol. 2. [Map] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/sanborn01192_006/
  2. (1950) Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Waterbury, New Haven County, Connecticut. Sanborn Map Company, - Feb 1950; Vol. 2. [Map] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/sanborn01192_008/
  3. (1956) Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Waterbury, New Haven County, Connecticut. Sanborn Map Company, - Republished 1956; Vol. 3. [Map] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/sanborn01192_011/
  4. Larson, A. (2023, June 19). Waterbury applies for $9.1M grant to complete brownfield remediations. Hartford Business Journal. https://hartfordbusiness.com/article/waterbury-applies-for-91m-grant-to-complete-brownfield-remediations/
  5. Oyanadel, J. A. (2024). Joe and Gloria An Immigrant's Story of Love: Love, Joy, Happiness, Beauty, Pleasures. Freedom! He Wants it All. (n.p.): Covenant Books, Incorporated.
  6. Eyelet Design. (n.d.). Eyelet Design [Business listing]. Yahoo Local. Retrieved June 28, 2026, from https://local.yahoo.com/info-10614600-eyelet-design-waterbury/

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