A Bridge to the Future

It's difficult to miss the symbolism. A decrepit bridge to a vacant factory, a metaphorical link to the town's long faded industrial boom, is removed.
http://www.vnews.com/08282011/7997425.htm

Published 8/28/2011

A Bridge to the Future

Fellows Gear Shaper Building Redeveloped for New Use

By Matt Clary
Valley News Business Writer

Springfield, Vt. -- It's difficult to miss the symbolism.

A decrepit bridge to a vacant factory, a metaphorical link to the town's long faded industrial boom, is removed.

In its place, a new bridge is installed, a span that connects not with a skeleton of the past but a reclamation that officials hope will be a springboard to a new era of prosperity.

That was the scene in Springfield, Vt., last week, where after a few false starts a crane eventually swapped pedestrian bridges across the Black River at the Fellows Gear Shaper building, which is well on its way to being transformed into a mixed-use development with a health clinic, professional offices, retail shops, restaurants and perhaps housing.

“The bridge is a very visible, very public landmark,” said Bob Flint, director of the Springfield Regional Development Center. Flint played a central role in assembling the private investments and public grants that made the project possible.

The oldest portions of the Fellows building go back to the early 20th century, and for generations, men and machines crossed the bridge to the factory that rises straight up from the river across from Route 11 just a few blocks north of downtown.

The company eventually built a new facility in North Springfield in the 1960s and the sprawling factory on the banks of the Black River has been in a period of decline since.

Now the property is poised to enter a new era. In the teeth of the worst national economy since the Fellows factory was still new, a multi-million dollar redevelopment of the building is well under way.

“It'll end up as a great building,” said Rick Genderson, a member of One Hundred River Street LLC, the Washington, D.C.-based development group that purchased the property three years ago.

The Fellows property isn't the only redevelopment project in Springfield, but Flint said the building, which peaked in the 1940s with more than 3,000 workers, holds a special place in the community's collective imagination.

“It's the highest impact because it's a visible symbol of what we used to be,” Flint said.

Fellows Gears Shaper played an important part in the life of Bill Carey.

After a career in the Navy, Carey has settled in San Diego, but he was born in Vermont in 1946, and when he was about 10, his family moved to Springfield, where his father retired from Fellows after more than more than 20 years on the factory floor.

Last week, Carey was among several hundred spectators who lined up along River Street in Springfield to watch as the old pedestrian bridge was lifted away and a new one was lowered into place.

“I can remember workers walking across the bridge,” said Carey, who typically returns to the area once a year to visit relatives. “There used to be a guard shack where you had to show your ID.”

Carey, who graduated from Springfield High School in 1964, worked at Fellows himself for a summer after high school and remembers the time when cars still used the bridge.

“We were told this is where the fat cats come in,” he said.

The Fellows project earns the northern New England redevelopment version of a hat trick: It's a historic preservation project; it's a Brownfield cleanup; it’s downtown development.

While construction is expected to continue into the fall, the anchor tenant for the building will be a health clinic operated by the parent company of Springfield Hospital. Springfield Medical Care Systems CEO Glenn Cordner said the 33,000-square-foot clinic with a $5.5 million price tag is expected to open in October.

The hospital and Genderson's development group have separate contractors, but all the work on the building has to be completed before it can be occupied.

“There's lots to do,” Cordner said. “It's been a complicated project.”

Last week's bridge swap had been attempted the prior week, but the earlier efforts were aborted because the crane on site wasn't large enough. Finally, Friday morning the pieces were in place for a successful operation.

Cordner said the after-hours, walk-in clinic in the Fellows building should improve access to preventative care for residents. It's also positioned to encourage fewer emergency room visits at Springfield Hospital by patients who could be treated in a more cost-effective setting.

What it won't do, at least directly, is create new jobs.

The clinic, which received a $2.5 million grant from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, also known as the stimulus, will consolidate four existing physician practices in the town. Those employees will staff the new clinic, Cordner said.

Other confirmed tenants include a psychologist's office and a pharmacy. With more than 150,000 square feet of space available, the Fellow's building has plenty of space to be filled.

The end result of redevelopment is intended to be mixed-use. One of the recent concepts for achieving the residential component is an assisted living facility, or some other type of senior-oriented housing. While the idea is in a nascent stage, Cordner said the medical system would welcome it.

“I think it would be a nice complement,” Cordner said.

Finding success for the residential component of mixed-used developments has been vexing for other downtown development projects in the area as well. In Claremont, where three former industrial mills were renovated in 2009, the largest of the three buildings was slated for residential condominiums.

More recently, the developers of the property have marketed the building as professional office space instead of condominiums.

There was general agreement last week that, regardless of any eventual residential uses, the finished product in Springfield needs to be more than just a medical building.

“This isn't going to be an annex of the hospital,” Flint said. “It's going to be more diverse than that.”

Other professional services have expressed interest, Genderson said. And the developers are in talks with two restaurants, one local and one national. One of those restaurants focuses primarily on breakfast and the other is full service, Genderson said, though he declined to name them because negotiations are ongoing.

While the health clinic itself won't produce new jobs, Cordner said the foot traffic that the clinic brings would be important to generating other business opportunities, such as restaurants.

In the meantime, Genderson is eager to see the building occupied again after decades of decline.

“I've been doing this for three years,” he said. “I can't wait.”