By embracing innovations in deaf education, the Clarke Schools for Hearing and Speech put itself out of business at its historic Northampton home. But that place still means a lot to people.
This past weekend, students who attended the former Clarke School for the Deaf before it rebranded itself returned ahead of a wrecking ball to salvage memorabilia from the school’s Galbraith Center.
They came a weekend after destruction that was in no way scheduled: On Aug. 5, fire tore through Rogers Hall not far away on the campus, located on the promontory known as Round Hill west of downtown.
That was heartache enough for those who prize this institution’s long history. Rogers Hall was in the midst of a renovation converting it to high-end apartments by Historic Round Hill Summit LLC.
On that devastating night, the risk of fire spreading to an adjoining former dormitory forced an evacuation of nearly a dozen apartments. The structure at 49 Round Hill Road was deemed a total loss, with damage pegged at $5 million; the already renovated adjoining structure at 47 Round Hill Road suffered smoke and water damage. The owner pledges to repair both.
In this place, history is a kind of treasure. The day after the fire, a former student who is now 69 drove up from Chicopee to stare at the ruin of his old dorm. Though he graduated 50 years ago, the loss of this building on the Clarke campus, his home for four years, hit Thomas R. Benoit hard. He came to bear witness half a century later.
Sometimes, people are lucky enough to have advance notice that change looms over a revered place.
On another part of campus, people with ties to Clarke returned Saturday not to inspect fire damage but to pry loose objects that hold deep meaning. They had permission to remove signs, plaques and even part of the Scott Auditorium gym floor before the building comes down next month, as work continues to make a new home for a West Springfield data and software company. All these changes follow the school’s decision to deliver services where hearing-impaired students already live, rather than requiring that they, and often their families, move to the Northampton area.
Michael O’Connell, who worked at Clarke for 37 years until his retirement in 2011, including service as the middle school principal, was back last weekend. He may have put it best when he said of the Galbraith Center: “This is our Boston Garden, it’s our Fenway Park.”
Memorabilia lovingly pried away will be made available to school alumni when they gather next summer for the institution’s 150th anniversary celebration. One of the biggest trophies was a section of floor that includes the name of the late Dennis Moulton, a 42-year Clarke staffer who spent so much time in the gym the school named it for him in 2003.
Moulton’s son, Dennis Jr., and daughter, Liz Alves, returned last weekend to watch as part of the floor bearing their dad’s name was freed up for travel, saving it from becoming demolition debris as changes continue to reorder this campus.
As souvenirs go, this one will be a little hard to store. But family members seemed overjoyed to preserve this tangible piece of Moulton’s legacy at Clarke. Alves and her brother lost their dad to cancer two years ago. Last weekend, they stood waiting to touch and hold something that seemed to embody him and his contribution to Clarke and the wider community. “It’s a piece of him we can have,” Alves told a Gazette reporter.