Colors o'er the Amherst skyline

No wonder the five-story Boltwood Place project is really starting to take shape: the construction crew keeps busy even on a Saturday.

Reach for the sky

Boltwood Place is now in full construction mode as they race to ready for a Fall opening. The five story mixed use LEED certified building is the first major construction project in the downtown in a l-o-n-g time.

Technically described as "infill," the building, five floors reaching 50 feet in height on only a 2,500 square foot postage stamp of a footprint, will most certainly stand out on its own, and will also stand in as the poster child for exactly what the Amherst Redevelopment Authority had in mind when we donated the prime adjacent property to the town for the construction of the Boltwood Walk Parking Garage ten years ago.

The ARA meets this Friday to receive and discuss the Final Report from our consultant on the Gateway Corridor Vision in anticipation of the joint meeting with the Planning Board/public hearing on Wednesday, June 29 in the prime location Town Room from 7:00 to 9:00 PM.

Gateway Vision area

Gateway Vision Final draft (hot copy) It's a big file so you have to download the PDF

Interesting comparison of construction potential for Gateway

Hypocritical activist

Vince O'Connor posing for Rockwell

A dozen years ago forever activist Vince O'Connor filed a warrant article (one of the hundreds over the past thirty years) demanding Amherst town meeting take parcel C-3 in town center via eminent domain. At that time the Amherst Redevelopment Authority owned the property,having themselves taken it by eminent domain in the early-to mid-1970s.

Vince was a prime mover in the largest land taking in Amherst history--the 1987 taking of the Cherry Hill Golf Course--where town meeting heavy handedly used an "emergency measure" legal proviso to preclude voter referendum. Thus, as an ARA member (Governor appointed), I took his threat seriously.

The ARA had just completed a commercial appraisal ($350,000) as the final step in preparing a Request For Proposals for a private developer to do something economically constructive with the valuable property.

But things changed quickly when the town became serious about a parking garage. The ARA quickly voted to donate the prime piece to Amherst, with only one provision: the parking garage had to have the structural integrity to support another deck to enable future expansion.

Vince's proposal lost overwhelmingly on a voice vote and the rest as they say is history. And without the Boltwood Walk Parking Garage , millions of dollars in expansion, renovation and new backfill construction would never have happened--especially the new $4 million Boltwood Place mixed-use building immediately behind Judie's that broke ground a few weeks back.

Four years ago Mr. O'Connor was at it again; he filed a town meeting warrant article calling for "the abolishment of the ARA." Although strangely enough he concurrently ran for the open ARA seat in a stealth write-in campaign because no one had bothered to collect the 50 signatures required to get on the printed ballot.

I won the 5-year seat, which I currently hold, besting Vince 67-18.

Tuesday's election is going to be a snoozer, as voter turnout will be nothing if not lame (thanks mainly to Catherine Sanderson being bullied into not rerunning for School Committee).

Thus Mr. O'Connor stands a chance of getting close enough (McCarthy vs President Johnson 1968 New Hampshire primary) to use as public relations spin that Gateway is opposed by a significant percentage of voters, even though it will be a percentage of a tiny percentage of overall voters.

Mr. O'Connor staunchly opposes the Gateway Project, a development which will add significantly to the town's anemic commercial tax base, while he champions the redirection of ARA energies to creating a "Boys and Girls Club" or YMCA type recreation facility that will of course be tax exempt. Amherst is already half owned by tax exempts.

Having run a fitness facility in Amherst for 28 years I know all too painfully well that the recreation offerings in the area are now overly abundant--and with Planet Fitness around, they are also exceedingly cheap.

Recent entries include UMass $50 million Recreation Center, Central Rock Climbing Gym in Hadley (with a competitor already on the drawing board), a storefront Aerobics and Fitness Studio in east Amherst and former Leading Edge Gym diehards still pining to reopen somewhere (over the rainbow) plus the oldest surviving full-service club in the area, Hampshire Athletic Club.

Mr. O'Connor also points out that numerous buildings (two of them churches) are within the overall Gateway corridor area and, unlike the demolished Frat houses, do not fit the description of "blighted."

But no other property is needed other than the 1.8 acre former Frat Row that UMass is prepared to donate. If a $4 million, five story building can fit on 2,500 square feet postage stamp space behind Judie's, what can you erect on almost 80,000 square feet (thirty times larger) of perfectly graded property?

Future home of Boltwood Place

Future home of something spectacular

If Amherst cannot put aside its development phobia for a cause this outstanding, then what hope is there for any beneficial project with vision and class?

The Springfield Republican Reports

The Bulletin Reported:

Funny profile of Vince by Mary Carey

UMass community outreach on neighborhood stabilization

Yes we can!

Click to enlarge

With all this talk about parking in downtown Amherst—specifically the lack of it—and with me actually agreeing for the first time in quite a while with today’s Gazette editorial suggesting the town NOT give away parking for free to stimulate business, you would think town officials would remember that the once controversial Parking Garage (costing about $40,000 per addition space gained) was specifically designed to e-x-p-a-n-d.

In fact, the Amherst Redevelopment Authority donated the prime location (valued at $350,000) under only one condition: that the garage be built strong enough to support a second (much cheaper to construct) deck.

Well at least one former town official remembered, as he snail-mailed me the actually blueprint from 1998. And at the time the cost was $1.3 million for 55 new spaces gained—or a Hell of a lot cheaper than the original cost per space for our quaint little garage.