AMHERST — The UMass Building Authority has purchased two properties at the southeastern edge of campus, next to the greenspace that once encompassed fraternity row.
The .78-acre site at 25 Butterfield Terrace, with a single-family rental home, and the .91 acre at 407 North Pleasant St., which has been used as a fraternity and sorority house, were recently sold for a combined $850,000 by Alpha Tauma Gamma, Inc.
UMass spokesman Edward Blaguszewski wrote in an email that the future use of these sites is uncertain.
“Currently, the university has no immediate plans for the properties,” Blaguszewski wrote. “Acquisition of the properties provides the university flexibility in planning for the future.”
The section of North Pleasant Street between the campus and downtown Amherst was once referred to as the Gateway Redevelopment District. But concerns about intense redevelopment from Amherst residents, expressed through representative Town Meeting, has left the 2-acre fraternity row vacant, aside from periodic art installations.
In 2017, the building authority put out a request for information, or RFI, for development of a privately developed, mixed-use project for the campus that could include 1,200 residential beds for students, a 200-room hotel and conference center and a fully staffed medical office. The stretch of North Pleasant Street was one of the sites identified for possible development, along with the parking lots on Massachusetts Avenue adjacent to the Robsham Memorial Center for Visitors, the parking lots on University Drive south of Massachusetts Avenue, and the North Village Apartments site.
Since then, though, the university has focused on the Massachusetts Avenue site, where Balfour Beatty Campus Solutions of Philadelphia, with Axium Infrastructure of New York City, will develop an 800-bed project, the first public-private partnership, on the Amherst campus. A small cafe and market, and other space, is likely on the first floor of this housing project.
Also on the same stretch of North Pleasant Street, 52 Fearing Street LLC, a company managed by Amherst developer Barry Roberts, goes before the Conservation Commission Wednesday at 7:50 p.m. for an abbreviated notice of resource area delineation completed by SWCA Environmental Consultants.
This will give the developer information about properties at 52 Fearing St. and 336 and 346 North Pleasant St., where the Mount Pleasant Apartments are located, and whether any work in the area will be subject to jurisdiction of the Wetlands Protection Act.
Scott Merzbach can be reached at smerzbach@gazettenet.com.
