Stories in the Gazette this week show Northampton to be ever on the move, as two projects expand the city’s already considerable appeal to residents and visitors.
Both will help connect people to the arts and to nature – and in so doing, to the pleasure of being alive. Both involve reuse of familiar spaces to awaken a sense of possibilities.
One debuted with a celebration Friday: a redesigned Pulaski Park. The other, the new home of the Northampton Community Arts Trust, is moving toward completion of a first phase at 33 Hawley St.
The new arts complex is a bit more hidden from view. But only for now. When complete, the arts space will become a magnet for cultural activity on the east side of downtown, enlivening street life and bolstering Northampton’s deserved reputation as a mecca for the arts.
It has taken many hands to get this nonprofit project where it is today. The trust has been intent on replacing the performance space lost when the Northampton Center for the Arts’ lease ran out at the former D.A. Sullivan School. Once complete, the space on Hawley Street will more than catch up by providing a new 220-seat black box theater, something that’s been on the downtown wish list for arts promoters for decades.
The trust opened up the space this week, offering visitors a look at the bare bones of this structure, formerly an athletic center that stood on the site of the former Northampton Lumber building. The trust bought the old gym space for $1.5 million in 2013 and began renovations last August. The work it expects to wrap up by year’s end will cost nearly $2 million. In all, the full project will come in at around $6.4 million.
As the trust’s capital campaign continues, its volunteer leaders can rightly claim that the work underway on Hawley Street will be a game-changer for the arts in Northampton. The Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts got things rolling with a $50,000 challenge grant. And Smith College generously kicked in $100,000.
On the other side of downtown, people gathered Friday afternoon to see what’s been going on for the past nine months behind barriers at Pulaski Park. What people will find is actually the realization of designs shaped seven years ago, when a Cambridge firm, Stephen Stimson Associates, landed the job of applying new thinking about public spaces to an old urban park.
Pulaski, as most know, is nestled into space to the east of the Academy of Music and to the west of Memorial Hall. The front opens onto Main Street; the rear overlooks the Roundhouse parking lot.
The revamp, paid for with $1.4 million in Community Preservation Act money and a $400,000 state parks grant, strives to offer different things to different interests, from a plaza on Main Street with movable cafe table and chairs to a grassy area and a woodland garden. One thing visitors won’t see: Overhead utility lines.
Instead, new lighting will brighten the plaza area, encouraging people to visit into the evening. While designers and landscapers shape a park’s features, people give it character. The old Pulaski Park had different personalities at different times of day, some of them a little dour. The new park is softer and greener. We hope people find it more welcoming, and through their use encourage others to stop by. Within the year, the city hopes to complete a second stage of the work by creating an overlook at the rear that connects this urban space with the Roundhouse parking lot. The project was pitched almost a decade ago. A recession got in the way, but you can’t keep a good idea down.