AMHERST — A proposed local historic district that would offer protections to the exterior appearance of buildings in neighborhoods between the University of Massachusetts campus and downtown Amherst could be ready to bring to annual Town Meeting in 2017.
But before the idea for the town’s second local historic district is complete, the North Prospect-Lincoln-Sunset Local Historic District Committee, which has been researching the concept for about 200 properties since December 2014, will hold a public hearing at 7 p.m. Thursday in the Town Room at Town Hall.
Formed by the Select Board in July 2014, the committee, assisted by town senior planner Nathaniel Malloy, has been discussing the boundaries for the district, which could extend as far east as Kendrick Park, and documenting the many styles of homes from Colonial Revival and Queen Anne to Craftsman and Victorian, which were built between late 1700s and early 1900s.
“It was a monumental undertaking which required hundreds of hours of work by study committee members, concerned citizens and student interns,” committee chairman Steven Bloom said in an email.
In a letter to property owners who would be affected by such a district, the committee explains that many of the streets are historically significant because of their inhabitants, including Supreme Court Justice Harlan Fiske Stone and author Eugene Field, who both lived in and near the neighborhood as children.
“Of the eight stops on the UMass online walking literary tour of Amherst, developed by the Historical Commission and UMass, four are within the proposed LHD borders,” the letter reads. “Pulitzer-prize winning poet Robert Frost and biographer Ray Stannard Baker, early feminist Mary Heaton Vorse and beloved children’s writer Norton Juster (‘The Phantom Tollbooth’) penned many of their classics in the neighborhood.”
The letter was accompanied by a survey to get feedback from residents about whether they would support the idea and whether they have concerns about future demolition of nearby properties.
So far, the Emily Dickinson Local Historic District, formed by Town Meeting in 2012, is the only such district in Amherst that gives additional protections to properties. That encompasses portions of Main, Triangle and Lessey streets, with 39 properties, including the Emily Dickinson Museum, the First Congregational Church and the Henry Hills House.
Within the district, anything that would have an impact on the streetscape must be reviewed by the historic district commission. Projects can then receive a certificate of appropriateness, meaning the project is ready to proceed, or a certificate of non-applicability, meaning the change does not involve exterior architectural features under the commission’s purview.
At the time the study committee was formed, Bloom said it would help protect the “small town New England charm that makes Amherst such a unique and truly special place.”
Local districts do not prohibit changes, but rather makes them compatible with the existing buildings and, in some cases, if a building is demolished, may require information about what will replace it. The district proposed includes the property at 290 Lincoln Ave., where a barn with connections to Frost, constructed around 1910, was demolished in 2012, over the objections of neighbors.
Once ready to proceed, the district would need approval by the Massachusetts Historical Commission and adopted by a two-thirds vote of Town Meeting.
Scott Merzbach can be reached at smerzbach@gazettenet.com.
