Kerstetter Letterwww.NorthamptonMA.gov/PLAN
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Greg Kerstetter from The Other Side of the Tracks <gregkerstetter@substack.com>
Date: Wed, Mar 17, 2021 at 2:25 PM
Subject: Saving St. John Cantius Church
To: <wfeiden@northamptonma.gov>
News from Northampton’s Ward 3 Neighborhood Association
Saving St. John Cantius Church
The neighborhood says NO
Greg Kerstetter
Mar 17
Close to downtown Northampton, the St. John Cantius Church on Hawley
Street is in danger of being razed, though Ward 3 neighbors have a different
idea.
The people of Ward 3 agree. The church must continue to stand.
Since the city held its Central Business Architecture Committee meeting in
February, neighbors living around the St. John Cantius Church have been
opposing the demolition of the 110-year-old building. They have been doing it
loudly and unanimously in public meetings, neighborhood gatherings, and in
letters to the editor of the local newspaper.
(See the W3NA Guest Column in The Daily Hampshire Gazette below.)
Ward 3 City Councilor Jim Nash has gathered a group of concerned citizens,
architects, and planners to devise an alternate plan for the restoration of St.
John Cantius. “Everyone wants to see the church preserved,” said Nash at
the Zoom meeting of the Ward 3 Neighborhood Association on March 9.
O’Connell Development Group of Holyoke bought the Hawley Street property
from the Catholic Church, and it has already demolished the old rectory that
used to sit next to the church and the community center behind the church,
replacing those buildings with new housing. Matthew Welter, vice president of
development for O’Connell, said the group wants the church to be the next
building to fall. Welter said at the February public meeting that O’Connell has
plans to put up five townhouses, containing three units each, to replace the
church and its attached tower.
That church is not just another building to the neighbors. In its letter to the
editor opposing the demolition, the W3NA Board of Directors said the church
“sits at the beating heart of Ward 3, reminding some of us of our ancestors
who built it, and the rest of us that while this city grows, it does not forget its
past.”
Nash at the Central Business Architecture meeting called the building “iconic
and striking.”
Nash has asked the leaders of the Catholic diocese to abolish deed
restrictions that it put on the sale of the land ten years ago that make the
church more difficult to development for commercial purposes. He has also
assembled a working group to brainstorm ideas for the church other than
razing it. He pointed to the repurposing of church buildings in Pittsfield, MA as
an example of way to proceed without tearing down the building that Polish
immigrants built at the turn of the 20th Century.
Tris Metcalfe, a local architect who is working with Nash, said that if
O’Connell went ahead with its plan “it would be a serious loss to civilization.”
He called churches among the most beautiful buildings that humans have
built.
For people like Ward 3 residents Helen Curtin of Grant Avenue and Fred
Zimnoch of Pomeroy Terrace, both of whom had connections to St. John
Cantius Church, demolishing the church would be more than losing a
building. It would be a blow to the Polish community that settled in the
neighborhoods of Ward 3. Curtin said that her friends who went to church at
St. John Cantius are “heartbroken” at the idea of the building coming down.
Zimnoch, who wrote a short history of St. John Cantius for the W3NA,
said losing the church would be another in a line of historic buildings
razed in Ward 3. The church, he said, “is like Shaw’s Motel. Once it’s
out of sight, it’s gone. It’s like knocking over a gravestone. No one
would ever remember.”
Zimnoch said that Shaw’s Motel was added on to one of the oldest buildings
in Northampton, one that Shubael Wilder erected before 1800. The house
that Wilder built and Shaw’s Motel, once famous as a rooming house for
many of the patients who left the Northampton State Hospital, was razed.
New housing replaced it.