Tag: Community Builders

A not for profit urban development organization, Community Builders helped oversee the redevelopment of the Northampton State Hospital campus.

Village Hill picks up steam

From The Gazette
by Chad Cain
Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Off the Beat: Village Hill picks up steam, despite economy


An anemic economy may have slowed momentum at Village Hill Northampton, but efforts to develop the former state hospital grounds into a mix of homes and businesses is picking up steam this summer.

On the north campus, where most of the homes are being constructed, Wright Builders Inc. reports that interest in its high-end subdivision has revved back up this year. The Northampton company is also a year ahead of schedule in its development of a cluster of townhouses.

Meanwhile, the state agency overseeing the sites overall development is in negotiations with a developer for a 26-home bungalow complex north of the community gardens. MassDevelopment is expected to ink a deal with that unnamed developer rather soon, said spokeswoman Kelsey Abbruzzese.

Finally, on the developments south campus, Kollmorgen Electro-Opticals new 140,000-square-foot manufacturing and office facility is expected to be completed in a few months, at which time the company plans to move its 370-plus employee workforce there from its King Street headquarters.

As for the home construction already under way, Jonathan Wright of Wright Builders said that nine of the 11 high-end, single-family lots in its Morningside subdivision are spoken for. Three of those homes are already built and one is under construction. Work on three more is slated for the fall, with two more to begin next spring.

Meanwhile, the 12-unit Eastview townhouse complex is selling fast. The first of three buildings is finished, with the units selling for between $269,000 and $349,000, depending on their location and whether they have two or three bedrooms.

New life given to Hospital Hill

From The Republican
Saturday, May 17, 2008
By Fred Contrada

The developers of Village Hill harked back to the days of Northampton State Hospital yesterday as they prepared to build a new community on the rubble of the former hospital for the mentally ill.

The groundbreaking paved the way for the construction of 11 single-family homes, 12 townhouse and 40 units of mixed-income housing on what was once called Hospital Hill. The ceremony took place on the site of Old Main, the hospital’s administrative building and architectural centerpiece. Old Main was demolished last year.

Jonathan A. Wright, the chief executive officer of Wright Builders Inc., told a gathering of dignitaries that he hopes the neighborhood of houses he is building will contribute to the site’s rich history.

Story Continues…

Mike Kirby: Back Row, Back Ward

From Community Radio Hour
Thursday, February 7, 2008
By Mary Serreze

Former City Councilor Mike Kirby is a political activist, a freelance investigative journalist, and author. His most recent book, “Back Row, Back Ward” examines the history of the efforts to redevelop Hospital Hill, former site of the Northampton Lunatic Asylum. He spins an arcane tale, involving public agencies, private developers, a string of mayors, and an Advisory Committee that caught the eye of the State Ethics Commission. It’s an alphabet soup: the State Division of Capital Planning and Operations (DCPO), The Community Builders (TCB), The Citizens’ Advisory Committee (CAC), Hospital Hill LLC, and the mysterious Northampton Development Corporation (NDC). He paints a picture of wishful thinking, back room dealing, pre-ordained conclusions, and disregard for historical values in the pursuit of profit.

Story Continues…

Hospital Hill housing to start

From The Republican
Saturday, January 12, 2008
By Fred Contrada

The first newly built residential units on Hospital Hill could break ground as soon as April 1 after the Planning Board approved the project Thursday night.

Community Builders, which is developing part of the residential component of the Village Hill Northampton project, sought and received permission to build 40 apartment units in six buildings on three parcels. Thirty-two of those units will be affordable to people earning up to 60 percent of the median area income. Twelve of those 32 will be earmarked for clients of the Department of Mental Health.

The entire campus where the commercial-industrial-residential complex is being built was once the site of Northampton State Hospital. The city gained control of the land when the state deinstitutionalized clients in the early 1990s, placing many of them in community settings. The project had been called the Village at Hospital Hill but MassDevelopment, the quasi-public agency overseeing the project, changed the name to Village Hill Northampton because it said some prospective commercial tenants were turned off by the reference to the hospital.

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Northampton to see changes

From The Republican

Thursday, January 03, 2008
By Fred Contrada

If all goes according to plan, 2008 will leave Northampton looking markedly different than it looked on Jan. 1.

A number of major construction projects will change the face of downtown Northampton and nearby Hospital Hill. The latter, which in recent years has been used mostly for sledding, will take a giant step toward begin turned it into a village with businesses and residents of all income levels.

Once the city’s biggest employer, Northampton State Hospital was a village of sorts in its heyday, with its own farm, bowling alley and beauty parlor. Since the Department of Mental Health began relocating patients into the community in the early 1990s, the city has dreamed of turning the site into a new kind of village.

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Abandoned Hospitals for the Mentally Ill Morph Into Housing

From The New York Times
By Katie Zezima
January 15, 2006

Abandoned Hospitals for the Mentally Ill Morph Into Housing

FOR 150 years or so, the brick buildings of the Northampton State Hospital have loomed large over this western Massachusetts city. At its peak, the hospital housed 2,400 people with mental illnesses.

Ten years ago, the state closed the hospital, which abuts Smith College, and the 70 buildings were left empty. Now, the 126-acre property, within walking distance of the downtown, is shedding its ghosts and being transformed into a mixed-use development.

The first residents moved into new homes on an outlying part of the property last year. Two buildings were converted into 35 town houses and apartments that will be rented in the next few months, and one more building will probably be refurbished. The other buildings will be replaced with houses, office buildings and industrial space, according to Thomas Kegelman, a project manager at Community Builders, the developer.

When it is finished, there will be 207 housing units. “It is a model of how to develop new housing with a compact footprint,” said Northampton’s mayor, Claire Higgins.

The same scene is playing nationwide, as municipalities and developers look for ways to grow in a confined space, while revitalizing shuttered mental hospitals. Although there is sometimes controversy about demolishing the old buildings, the sites have no problem attracting developers or buyers.

The Benjamin Development Company in Garden City, N.Y., bought the 850-acre Harlem Valley Psychiatric Hospital in Dover, N.Y., in Dutchess County, north of New York City, for $4.5 million, and plans to build what amounts to a new town, with 1,200 residential units, retail and office space and a nine-hole golf course. The developers say they hope the nearby Harlem Valley-Wingdale Metro-North Railroad station will attract buyers who commute to Manhattan.

The Villebois, a community of 2,400 residences in Wilsonville, Ore., built on the old Dammasch State Hospital grounds, has a waiting list, as does the Grand Traverse Commons in Traverse City, Mich., a luxury town house development on the site of the former Traverse City State Hospital.

Meanwhile, prices for three-bedroom homes at the Rivermark in Santa Clara, Calif., on the former grounds of Agnews State Hospital, have increased to about $920,000, from about $650,000 in 2002, residents say. Sun Microsystems also built its headquarters on a parcel there.

While the projects bring benefits, they are often hard to develop. The sites are usually neglected and have rotting buildings filled with asbestos and lead paint. Then there are human hurdles: getting buyers to overcome any stigmas about the sites, dealing with the concerns of former patients and employees who have a personal connection to the land, and considering the objections of preservationists who are worried about the fate of historic buildings.

Overcoming the mental hospital stigma was difficult for Linda Jones, 39, who coordinates client services for a diversity training firm and grew up not far from a mental institution, Boston State Hospital. “Everyone in the neighborhood just considered it a place where the mentally ill went, and the rest of us just stayed away,” Ms. Jones said.

It’s no surprise that Ms. Jones, who has spent years trying to buy a home, was skeptical after hearing that part of the hospital was being developed into market-rate and low-income housing. But after attending community meetings and a home buyers’ class offered by the developer, Ms. Jones, who rents a one-bedroom apartment nearby, decided to move into the new community. She says she hopes to get a market-rate home for about $250,000.

Rebecca Macauley, a medical secretary who spent about five years as a patient living at Northampton State Hospital during the 1980’s and later worked as a security guard there, is glad to see the property developed. Ms. Macauley says the transformation reflects the progress made in treating patients with mental illness, who now tend to get help in smaller settings. “We’re now treating people like normal human beings, and in a back-door kind of way this is what the redevelopment is saying,” she said.

NSH buildings attract the daring

By Barney Beal, Staff writer

Daily Hampshire Gazette. Thursday August 2, 2001.

NORTHAMPTON – The Northampton State Hospital, which once housed thousands of mentally ill patients, has become a temptation for college-age thrill seekers drawn at night to the abandoned rooms and tunnels by MTV and the Internet.

According to the Massachusetts State Police, which is responsible for making arrests on the hospital grounds, 31 people have been arrested there since the beginning of the year and numerous others issued criminal summonses.

People caught wandering through the buildings can be charged with trespassing on state property and breaking and entering. Those arrested often claim they were motivated to see the hospital after hearing on the MTV show “Fear” that it is one of the scariest places in the country, police said.

However, a spokeswoman for MTV said the show has never created such a list or mentioned the Northampton State Hospital on the program.

On the program, a small group of contestants is placed overnight in a scary building and told to accomplish small tasks that require testing their fear of the supernatural. Trespassers at the state hospital have been caught with cameras taking pictures and videotape of themselves walking through the buildings, recreating the show.

A search of the Internet finds three different Web sites with accounts and pictures of people exploring the buildings. At the site www.geocities.com/ironfistorg/NoHo_Index.html, a group calling itself IRONFIST describes in self-congratulatory terms how it sneaked into the buildings to obtain footage of abandoned rooms and broken hospital equipment.

“The forbidding eternal appearance of the Northampton State Hospital is enough to discourage even the most intrepid explorers. But the presence of a highly skilled 24-hour security firm is even more of a reason to give the location a wide berth. IRONFIST saw this presence of security not as a discouragement, but as an invitation to penetrate the building and explore without being known to have been in,” one passage from the Web site reads.

IRONFIST is among a growing number of organizations calling themselves Urban Explorers that break into abandoned buildings, city tunnels or military bases around the country to explore. Accounts of visits to the Northampton State Hospital can also be found at www.darkpassage.com/forays/Northampton.html and www.sinister.com/~ianh/asylum.html.

Intrigue, danger

One reason for the increased interest in the hospital was a project in November when a German artist placed speakers throughout the complex and played J.S. Bach’s “Magnificat,” police said.

“It think it intrigues them. If somebody’s willing to spend $1 million to soothe the ailing souls, it might be haunted,” Massachusetts State Police Trooper Jeremy Cotton said.

While the grounds may be a source of interest to explorers, they are dangerous as well. Broken glass, syringes and asbestos are all over the buildings, Cotton said. “If they do get hurt in there, we’d have a hard time getting them out. With continued access, injuries are only inevitable.”

Trespassers have taken mementoes of their visits, such as old medical files or items from the morgue, one of the more popular destinations, police said.

According to one security guard, a stained glass window that would have required a truck and ladder to remove has been taken.

And there have been reports of stolen building materials.

In June Joshua Charbonneau, 21, 23 Nagler Cross Road, Huntington, and Jordan J. Skipper, 24, of Montgomery, submitted to facts sufficient to warrant a guilty finding in Northampton District Court on charges of trespassing on state or county property, vandalizing a state building and larceny under $250. They were assessed $135 fines and ordered to perform 20 days of community service after they were caught stealing 200 pounds of copper sheets from the grounds. The most common penalty for trespassers in a $50 fine, police said.

‘Tight security’

MassDevelopment is the economic development agency which is a partner with The Community Builders of Springfield in redeveloping the former state hospital property.

MassDevelopment took over management from the state July 1 and has extended the contract with the firm handling security on the grounds, said David Webster, vice president of community planning and development.

“We fully intend to keep tight security out there and if we catch people we intend to prosecute them,” Webster said. “It’s private property. People have no business being there. It’s dangerous.”

Webster said they plan to secure all the doors and windows, but he acknowledged that securing the entire site is a difficult talk because the grounds are so large.

A security guard is on duty 24 hours. However, according to one guard, people can drive on to the grounds with their headlights off or simply walk in and they won’t be noticed.

Reference this article
Beal, Barney. 2001. “NSH Buildings Attract the Daring.” Daily Hampshire Gazette, August 2, 2001. https://northamptonstatehospital.org/2001/08/02/nsh-buildings-attract-the-daring/.

Northampton State Hospital