The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
A battle for ‘the heart of Madison’
Historical Society balks at proposals for The Academy; Banisch sees rare opportunity for town
MADISON — The Madison Historical Society opposes all four development proposals for the vacant Academy Elementary School and the 5.13-acre parcel it sits on, which includes two ball fields and a popular playground.
The historical society voiced its opposition in a position paper, which was sent to the town planner and Board of Selectmen, in addition to other groups. The MHS joins others in town with concerns about the historical significance of the building and loss of downtown open space if the proposals are accepted as is.
“It’s such an important historic property in the heart of town, in the Madison Green Historic District,” said Carol Snow, chairwoman of the Madison Historical Society Preservation Committee, an alternate on the Historic District Commission and a resident in the Madison Green Historic District.
“We’re not opposing development — we’re definitely supporting preservation of the property, the building and the 5.13 acres — but we are against the four proposals, as they were presented,” she said.
The Academy, as it is known, was once Hand Academy, and was a gift from Daniel Hand in 1884; it became a public high school in 1887. The original school building was demolished and replaced with today’s 25,000square-foot building in 1921.
Daniel Hand attached certain conditions to the gift, including “the condition that an academy always be kept there.”
“It is interesting to note that Hand stipulated that ‘if the building is ever not to be used as an educational institution, it is to be sold and the money is to be used for the education of (blacks) in the South,’ ” according to madisonhistory.org.
Academy Elementary School closed in 2004 and was transferred to the town of Madison in 2011.
Since the school, at 4 School St., shut its doors, town officials have sought a new use for the building that would maintain its community purpose. The Shoreline Arts Alliance sought to renovate the building into a cultural center for the arts, but after three years announced plans in July 2016 to end its partnership with the town.
Proposals from Old Lyme’s Greylock Property Group LLC; Waltham, Mass., Dakota Partners Inc.; New York City’s RAL Development Services LLC and Women’s Institute for Housing and Economic Development Inc. with the HOPE Partnership, which has offices in Boston and Middletown, were presented to the Board of Selectmen last month.
While all different, they included mixed-use development featuring new residential, such as luxury condominiums and apartments; community and commercial uses, such as community gardens for its residents; tennis courts and other active recreational uses; as well as one proposal that includes donating a 1.6-acre green to the town of Madison. All four proposals can be found at https://bit.ly/2IMJBKO.
While the town’s request for proposals specifically stated, “The property was located within the Madison Historic District as well as the Downtown Village District. Development proposals should adhere to the guidelines contained within these respective district regulations,” the historical society is concerned that “each of them proposes changes not in keeping with this area of historic significance.”
Snow voiced concern about losing the open space. “We’d like to see much less density and preferably just have any kind of housing units be within the structure itself, in order to preserve the
open space.
“If that’s just completely impossible, from a financial perspective, we would like to see a sensitive use of that open space, with respect to the fact that it’s surrounded by a historic district,” she said.
First Selectman Tom Banisch said with the amount of remediation required on the building, the RFP included the open space behind the school to be used, if the interested parties wanted to include that in their proposals.
“The goal was to get something done with Academy School,” he said. “So, in trying to get something done with Academy School we said, ‘Here are your options. There’s 5 acres included … use any or all of that to come back with a proposal.’”
While all the proposals included using the entirety of the land, Banisch said he was most impressed with Greylock’s presentation.
“... their proposal included giving back some of the land, about an acre of the land, by the green and I think they were calling it the Academy Green,” he said.
“In three out of four of the proposals that came back, they all included a lot of green space,” he said.
In addition, Banisch said, with the town losing money from the state every year, increased tax revenue is especially important at this time.
“We have to start building our grand list and we don’t have a lot of places to do it,” he said. “If you think about Madison, there’s not a lot of opportunities for any kind of growth, whether it be commercial, residential, whatever it might be. We’ve been talking about getting close to built out.”
Banisch said this development could potentially add $20 million to $30 million to the grand list.
The first selectman seemed passionate about this project.
“I firmly believe, I truly believe that this is the right thing to do for Madison,” he said. “We need to breathe life into that building. …
“My goal with Academy School is to bring it back to life and to make it part of the downtown, so if you look at some of the things that were spoken at some of these meetings it included talking about the connectivity between the green and downtown,” he said.
The grassroots group, ACADEMY — Save The Heart of Madison, is a group of residents working to keep townspeople informed about the proposed use of the property, while at the same time voicing their concern about the proposals.
“There’s a threshold issue here which is ideological and that is this is just the wrong place to be doing this,” said member Kathryn Hunter. “It’s, ‘What do you want our town to be?’ ‘Do you want this in the heart of our town?’ ”
Hunter applauds the efforts of the town leaders to be fiscally conservative and grow the local tax base, yet her rallying cry is “Wrong Five Acres.”
Catherine Flynn Donovan, who grew up in Madison, raised her children here and is working with ACADEMY — Save The Heart of Madison, feels strongly about saving the land and would have preferred a “building only” RFP. Her involvement harkens back to the work done by the Shoreline Alliance for the Arts.
“When SAA was going to try and take it over and make it into a community space and a theater, performance, art space, I thought that was perfect and I got involved with it then,” she said. “I still think that that is something that can be done.”
Donovan said she would even support using the building for residential or commercial use, but feels very strongly about preserving the open space.
“It is the only green space that belongs to the town of Madison in the historic district, in the downtown village,” she said.
Even though some of the proposals include open space, Donovan said it would not be the same as what is there presently.
“It’s not the bucolic setting when you look from one side and you see the beautiful steeple of the Congregational Church and you turn the other way and you’ve got St. Margaret’s and the senior center and it’s just a community space,” she said. “It’s the heart. That’s why we’ve called it the heart of Madison. It’s right smack down in the heart of Madison.
Snow echoes these sentiments.
“My impression of the general response from the town and from the surveys is, in a fairly unified voice, to save the 1921 building and preserve as much open space as possible,” Snow said. “As a historic preservation representative we’re certainly willing to work with developers who are presenting proposals in any way we can to help them get their proposals through.”