LEVERETT — From her 10th-floor home and studio on lower Manhattan’s Murray Street in the 1980s, Susan Mareneck began creating a large, five-panel oil-on-linen painting of the neighborhood just blocks from the World Trade Center.
“River to River II,” painted while Mareneck divided her time between New York City and Leverett, is her interpretation of the view from her city home. It is built from layers of brushstrokes that she says help develop its tonality.
The piece depicts the reality of her surroundings, from the tops of the trees in the neighboring City Hall Park and the windows of the adjacent 250 Broadway building to the distant Brooklyn Bridge, and the ghosts of some of the historic buildings once located there.
But while Mareneck returned full time to Leverett in 2009, becoming executive director of Montague Catholic Social Ministries and chairing the town’s Historical Commission, she had yet to find a suitable place to display the artwork, keeping what measures 33 feet long by 8 feet tall in storage in Belchertown.
With support from the Friends of the North Leverett Sawmill, of which she is also a member, Mareneck hit upon the idea of using the available space inside to show her work, at once commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and, being inside a building that was a witness property to the American Revolution, celebrating the 250th birthday of the United States.
“Until I put this up on Sept. 4, I’d never seen it up in one place before,” Mareneck said. “It’s been so wonderful to open it up after 15 years being in storage, and the pieces all look pretty good.”
For the past several weeks, Mareneck’s work has been featured in private showings, as well as a Sept. 11 commemoration ceremony held at the sawmill.
The painting hangs on a long wall, lit by natural light from the opposite side of the building, nearer the Sawmill River.
For Mareneck, there are similarities between the World Trade Center, the symbolic heart of industry for the United States, and the sawmill, which on a much smaller scale was once the center of industry for Leverett and nearby locales, producing the lumber used to build many homes and remaining in operation until the late 1990s.
“This muscular building has so much in common with the muscular site of lower Manhattan,” Mareneck said
Mareneck was in the city on Sept. 11, 2001, seeing the devastation firsthand, and made her way back to her home the next day as smoke continued to billow through the neighborhood. “It was like a crematorium; so much ash,” she said.
She considers the piece a work in progress. Some elements remain incomplete, she said, particularly the ghost buildings that were once part of the landscape. Among them are King’s College, which became Columbia University, as well as a pier shed, the Unitarian Universalist Church, the publishing houses of Newspaper Row and Bridewell, an 18th-century prison.
“Four decades and I’m still working on it,” Mareneck said.
To honor Sept. 11, there is a display memorializing those who lost their lives 25 years ago, with photos and inscriptions attached to a wall of the sawmill’s former tool room. On the anniversary itself, the “WTC 9/11” composition by Steve Reich was played, interspersed with people’s voices, before the symbolic ringing of a bell as the names of those who died were read aloud.
People who have visited recount their memories and contemplate how that day continues to effect so many. “People get emotional with their own reflections,” Mareneck said.
Accompanying her work is a collection of photographs of the World Trade Center, stitched together in a mosaic, completed by Celia A. Shapiro, Mareneck’s neighbor on Murray Street for 20 years.
Collectively known as “Post Office + North Tower,” the photographs were taken in the 1980s.
“It’s interesting to me how we both interpreted this experience of the buildings of Tribeca and their reflected light in different ways with different mediums,” wrote Shapiro, who now lives in Miami.
With cold weather approaching and the sawmill being an unheated building, Mareneck will soon remove her work. “It’s been a good run; a lot of people have come to see it,” Mareneck said.
Her showcase has demonstrated how the space can be used as a gallery for big pieces. “Someone could do something pretty large in here,” Mareneck said.
In fact, the Friends were approached by an artist with 15,000 pieces of experimental art who sees possibilities of having some portion of these at the sawmill.
“It’s been a good generator of imagining what this could be like. Steve [Stroud] said, ‘Think of this as a feasibility study,'” Mareneck said.
Also known as the Slarrow Sawmill, the building is named after Joseph Slarrow, its first owner, who was a lieutenant in the Continental Army and later captain during the Revolutionary War.
Sawmill restoration progress
The Friends group is envisioning a $2 million restoration project of the 81-by-29-foot post-and-beam building getting underway in 2027.
In hand is a federal $683,500 grant from the Historic Preservation Fund administered by the National Park Service, through the Department of the Interior, awarded in recognition of the sawmill being a witness property to the American Revolution.
The Friends also have a $20,000 grant from Greenfield Cooperative Bank and money from the town’s Community Preservation Act account and from the Massachusetts Cultural Facilities Fund. Community fundraising will also support the restoration.
“Our mission is to be a museum of industrial technology, and a community space,” Mareneck said.
A scale model inside the tool room at the sawmill shows what will happen.
The main floor, once the primary work area, will become a three-season space with folding glass windows on the front facade; these openings have been covered to secure the building. The ripsaw and planer on the main floor will both stay, though they may move to free up some space.
A small alcove will allow people to peek into the building around the clock, and the tool room will become restrooms.
The lower level, closer to the river, is viewed as a four-season room where someone might offer a yoga class or lecture; renting that area will provide ongoing income to maintain the site.
“People are getting interested in using the sawmill for their own purposes,” Mareneck said.
Already, the grounds next to the sawmill, a 4.6-acre site, have become the Heritage Park and Nature Trail. At the entrance to the loop trail is a platform with benches and signs, with a swing below. The trail leads to the foundation of the Graves Ironworks and other stone walls of mills that once lined the Sawmill River from Lake Wyola in Shutesbury to Montague.
Signs with QR codes allow people to explore the past 250 years of history, and even earlier times before European settlers interacted with the Indigenous population.
When that trail ceremonially opened in 2025, the sawmill briefly became a place for artists to exhibit works connected to the sawmill.
Mareneck’s large piece helps demonstrate the building’s versatility.
“It will be fun to open the sawmill to the community and have them give us ideas, to help us make it an interesting space,” Mareneck said.
