CUMMINGTON — Early Wednesday afternoon, what remained of Stephen Young Yoshen’s workshop at 33 Bryant Road was still smoldering after it caught fire in the early morning hours of the day. Only the concrete foundation of the building was still intact, and some fragments of charred framework still remained.
In the center of the pile of debris was a skeleton of what had been Yoshen’s car. The trees around the house were not impacted, although some trees in the direct vicinity of the workshop were blackened.
The four-story, 40 foot by 60 foot building was filled with industrial machinery, and a variety of woods, including cherry, maple and cedar, and the cause of the fire has yet to be determined.
Yoshen said it is impossible to estimate how much the machinery, equipment, and materials were worth. But he also doesn’t really care.
For someone who woke up, was making tea and coffee, and saw the roof of his workshop go up in flames just before 5 a.m., Yoshen’s demeanor and energy weren’t impacted in the least.
“I saw it on fire and I realized there was sort of nothing I could do,” Yoshen said on Wednesday while sitting in the kitchen of his nearby house, which overlooks where the workshop had been. “You know it’s just stuff. Nobody was in there. No one was going to get hurt. It’s money, it’s stuff. But that stuff is not so important to me. You know my family, my community are.”
The workshop wasn’t a universe of his own, or simply a personal loss. While on the one hand he had worked extensively out of it, and it is even the place he constructed his mom’s casket, Yoshen’s workshop has for the past 20 years also belonged to the community. That’s because the Cummington resident for two decades has welcomed anyone who wants to work on projects or use equipment in the space.
Nino Soberon, his apprentice, launched a GoFundMe Thursday asking people to donate to “Help rebuild Stephen Yoshen’s community workshop.” The drive seeks to raise $20,000.
Yoshen also asks for tools to borrow that people have stored in their basement or garages and aren’t being used.
“I probably met dozens and dozens of people since starting to work for Stephen,” said Soberon, describing how many people frequent the shop. “It’s at least once a week there’s a new face in there just working.”
Over the past 20 years, Yoshen has had one request for those who use the tools and space.
“What I said was, if they’re building a $10 million house for Jeff Bezos, leave $1 million on the table,” said Yoshen.
Yoshen is already envisioning the new workshop that he, at 70, is going to build with the help of his community, and he estimates that his new building will cost $150,000 with materials.
“I might make an apartment there for myself,” he said, daydreaming.
In his home he currently has no access to water or electricity because of the fire, but he is tiding the time over with a generator.
“So we have a generator which you know will give us some partial electricity, and I have to get a new pressure tank. I mean we need to clean that mess out,” he said.
While Yoshen was stoic about the fire, he was tempted to run into the burning building and retrieve a sauna that was inside the shop. The sauna was a project he undertook with his niece, Malani Sundaram, who pitched a sauna on a trailer as a business idea.
“I thought, is there any way to pull that sauna out of the building before the fire gets to it?,” said Yoshen. “I mean, mostly I wanted to save the sauna.”
Yoshen is “mostly retired” but described his consistent preoccupation to be “helping people make things.” He moved to western Massachusetts 40 years ago, originally living in Plainfield and was instrumental in kickstarting Earthdance, a nonprofit dance cooperative. He simultaneously built his house and workshop in Cummington 20 years ago.
“He helps you realize your potential,” said Sundaram, who was visiting Yoshen. “He says yes to anything. He turns normal things into dreams, and he won’t say that about himself.”
Multiple Hilltown fire departments responded to the fire, the cause of which is under investigation.
