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| Around The Grange |
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Manchester committee suggests selling grange hall |
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By Kimberly Phillips, Journal Inquirer (12/11/2007) |
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DECEMBER 2007 -- Members of the Building Reuse Committee have recommended the sale of the former Grange hall on Olcott Street and the hiring of an architect to study three historic Bennet Middle School buildings.
The proposals come from an eight-member group convened this year to review several municipal buildings that now are unused and submit recommendations for their future use, including renovation costs.
Democratic Minority Leader Kevin L. Zingler, who chairs the Building Reuse Committee, said today that members have toured each of the buildings and are working one-by-one to develop recommendations on each. First on the list was the Grange hall next to the landfill complex.
Zingler said the group discussed the possibility of leasing the building to a civic or nonprofit organization, such as the Police Activities League, or obtaining an appraisal of the property and putting it up for sale. Committee members backed the latter.
The Grange, the civic organization that leased the building from the town for decades in exchange for upkeep, vacated the property when its lease expired June 1.
As for the three buildings on the Bennet campus - the Cheney building, boiler plant, and former firehouse - Zingler said, "There are numerous ideas that were thrown out" during the committee's November meeting.
School administrators are in need of cold storage for records, he said, and the schools' building and grounds department is in need of additional space. It might be possible to accommodate those needs in one or more of the buildings.
But no one knows the exact cost of removing the boiler in the boiler plant, renovating the buildings' interiors, or sprucing up their facades, Zingler noted. That's why the group supported the hiring of an historic preservation architect to determine the costs and feasibility.
"We really need to find out what the total cost is to put the Cheney building online," Zingler said, adding that his biggest fear is having the aged structures shadow a renovated Bennet school.
These three historic structures were saved from the wrecking ball last year when the state Historic Preservation Council intervened in the town's plans to raze the buildings as part of a renovation project at the school.
Next week, the reuse committee is expected to meet with members of the Parks and Recreation Advisory Committee, the Conservation Com-mission, and the Manchester Land Conservation Trust to discuss the reuse of two Case Mountain buildings the town bought late last year.
The meeting, at 4:30 p.m. Dec. 19 in Lincoln Center, will be a brainstorming session on what to do with the log cabin and carriage shed on what's known as the Dennison property.
The cabin was built by the Case family around 1917 and is made of chestnut and stone. The carriage shed was built in the 1930s near the lodge.
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