WINTHROP — People stop by the house at 28 Bowdoin St. and want to take a look inside.
Some might remember it as the Old Colony Ice Cream shop, where you could walk up to the window and order your heart’s desire.
Others remember it as one of several private hospitals in this town that operated when Winthrop was a summer destination for rusticators and train travelers.
Today the house is taking on a new identity — home to Clean Up Group, a Winthrop-based property maintenance company.
On Friday, with her daughter Maggie playing under her desk, Jen Moses said she remembers coming to Old Colony Ice Cream when she was girl growing up in Winthrop.
By the time she and her husband, Fred, looked at it last year, however, the ice cream shop had been closed for a while and the building was suffering from neglect.
The thing that attracted them to the house was not nostalgia or the pistachio green exterior paint or a fondness for frozen treats.
It was the garage.
The space in the two-bay garage is big enough to house the equipment and supplies they need to run the company, which provides professional window-cleaning services, pressure cleaning, roof cleaning and janitorial services across the Northeast. That includes the steel supports fabricated by the former T.W. Dick Co. to support window cleaners when they are washing windows on high-rise buildings.
The two apartments upstairs don’t hurt either, as they generate income.
The Moseses bought it at a foreclosure sale and started doing what they do best — cleaning it up.
They have lifted, pulled, sanded, polished, painted and cleared out what several generations of occupants had left behind, including the 8-foot-long ice cream freezer.
“It took eight men to move it,” Moses said.
They have been making the most of the slow winter season to get things in habitable shape. She spent some time in one first-floor room scraping the carpet pad from the hardwood floor by hand. And she painted a couple of times, but the bulk of the work has fallen to Fred.
The renovation process has brought some unexpected gifts.
“When we pulled the deck off, we found about $200 in change underneath it,” she said. It was from years of customers dropping nickels, dimes, pennies and quarters. It’s now in a jug.
They’ve also uncovered some artifacts of the building’s earlier history as a hospital up in the attic and elsewhere. A Hannaford Drug sign was tucked behind a wall, and they found a spinning wheel, but how it got there and who owned it remain a mystery.
But the most enduring gift is the curiosity of the people who have been watching the restoration.
“The community has been wonderful,” she said. Area residents have stopped by to take a peek and reminisce, even someone who was born in the house when it was a hospital.
Winthrop historian David Cook said the town supported a couple of private hospitals in the early years of the 20th century. For decades, people traveled to Winthrop in the summer by rail to spend sometimes the entire summer in one of the area hotels. Before cars became prevalent, services developed where people needed them.
Now, in the age of vehicles, the location of the Clean Up Group’s office is more of a convenience.
The Moseses have relocated to Winthrop from their former site on Route 3 in Augusta. The Bowdoin Street site is just a couple of miles from their own home, and being in town makes her feel connected to her community, Moses said.
“I can watch the kids walk to the school bus stop and go to the library. You really feel like you’re part of something,” she said.
As far as the renovation has come, it still has a bit more to go. On Monday, the siding is expected to arrive and after a couple windows are replaced, it will be installed.
It will not be tinted the color of a certain nut-flavored ice cream.
It will be white.
Jessica Lowell — 621-5632
Twitter: @JLowellKJ
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