After 143 years, the Clarke School for Hearing and Speech is leaving its 11-plus-acre campus at the top of Round Hill in Northampton.
It won’t be going far, though. The administration is consolidating operations to Bell Hall, a newer building on the edge of the original, historic property. The school is offering for sale six large brick buildings, an Olympic-sized pool, playing fields, a groundskeeper’s cottage, a garage, and a huge steam plant that heats much of the campus—all perched above the city in a handsome residential neighborhood with spectacular views of the Valley.
The estimated value is $16 million.
In May, the school issued a request for proposals (RFP) for prospective developers through its realtor, LandVest, a group affiliated with Christie’s Auction House. The RFP emphasizes the history of the site and value of the architecture, listing each building with photos and detailed histories.
In an interview with the Advocate last week, Clarke School president William Corwin reaffirmed his hope that the RFP would identify a new owner (or multiple owners) whose reuse plan will preserve the character and integrity of the site. Proposals are due by June 30.
Included in LandVest’s online information packet for prospective developers is a zoning study that details how the property can and cannot be used. Currently, it is available for uses such as housing (from mansions to dormitories), educational, and agricultural, but also permitted is use as a cemetery, mixed retail, bed and breakfasts, a place to store junked cars, or a museum. Not allowed are office parks, planned villages, parking garages, human or veterinary hospitals, artists’ spaces, theaters, restaurants, or a hotel.
A diagram at the back of the document illustrates how 84 housing units could fit on the space allotted. To achieve such density? In the site plan, many—but not all—of the original buildings would be preserved, and space that was once open or wild would be filled with housing. If the parcels were designated as Smart Growth Overlay Districts, more than twice as many units could be added.
“It has also been suggested that a historic district be created for a portion or all of the Clark [sic] School campus,” the document states, pointing out that if the neighboring Elm Street Historic District is “used as a guide,” any “building construction, alteration or demolition” will need to be reviewed and approved by the city’s Historical Commission. “Satisfying the requirements of the Commission,” the report concludes, “has the potential to add considerable cost to a project and may not make [it] feasible.”
Despite Corwin’s stated commitment to reuse and his efforts to make his and the school board’s decision-making process as transparent and accessible as possible, some are skeptical.
In a June 1 email from Northampton City Planner Wayne Feiden to members of both the Elm Street Historic District and the city Historical Commission, Feiden describes a nascent group forming around the issue: “I met last night with a new group that may become the Roundhill Neighborhood Association. They are looking at the Clarke School redevelopment and want to make sure that it is well done.”
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The Clarke’s School’s mission is to provide “children who are deaf and hard of hearing with the listening, learning and spoken language skills they need to succeed.”
When it was founded in 1867, the Clarke School for the Deaf was making a revolutionary break with a long tradition of teaching deaf students to depend on sign language as their chief mode of communication. While the school’s educators did not oppose its use (and recognized that in some cases signing was essential), they felt that for many deaf students, using signing as their only language served to ostracize and limit them. Through lip-reading and different techniques that taught speech to those who would never hear it, the school graduated teens into a hearing adult world.
Until the 1970s, the school was residential and its dormitories were homes to students as advanced as the ninth grade. Approximately 90 percent of all deaf children are born to hearing parents, and before recent advances in early screening and detection, many people were diagnosed with hearing loss only after much of their early childhood development had progressed in silence. The older the student is when diagnosed with hearing loss, the more long-term and intense the work can be achieving fluency in the mainstream.
These days, though, it’s possible for physicians to detect and address deafness in newborns only a few weeks old, and provide the infants with hearing aids and other technology they’ll need for early verbal development. Both Corwin’s daughters were born with hearing loss, attended Clarke and are now in mainstream elementary schools.
Technology, Corwin said, “has enabled even profoundly deaf kids to essentially do any- and everything a kid with typical hearing can do. Up to and including playing the violin, speaking on a cell phone, or have their speech and language be absolutely indistinguishable from a hearing kid.”
Deaf children are now sometimes entering pre-school right along with their hearing peers. Clarke is now a day school with a student body of 60, and there are no longer any ninth-graders. Many of the students graduating earlier this month were much younger than graduates were a few decades ago.
But while class sizes at the school have been reduced, its teachers are reaching a wider range of students than ever before. The school has expanded its operations and services to locations in Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Jacksonville, and it is even working with a group in Kuwait to bring its expertise there. But here in Northampton, as the school is able to achieve its mission more and more effectively, more and more rooms in the dormitories and staff housing go unused.
The school is paying to heat and maintain partially empty buildings. President Corwin points out that this money could be better spent helping deaf children hear and training teachers to more effectively meet their needs.
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“As a commission, we’re largely advisory,” David Drake, the head of Northampton’s Historical Commission, said in a June 10 interview with the Valley Advocate. “We offer counsel to the mayor, the different offices in City Hall, and the public.”
If a structure built before 1900 is brought to the planning board because someone wants to add to it or demolish it, the proposal goes before Drake’s commission before approval is granted. The commission’s consent may also be sought for later buildings if they’re aesthetically or historically exceptional.
“Over the last four or five years, we’ve reviewed between 60 and 70 cases, and we only have stepped in on two or three occasions,” Drake said. In one recent instance, an old garage behind a home near South Street was protected because, unbeknownst to the owner, it had been where Amelia Earhart had first learned her way around a combustion engine.
Often the Commission is able to protect a building simply by informing the owners of the building’s history and working with them to revise their plans. If necessary, though, they do have one tool they can use to protect an endangered building.
“We can issue a demolition delay,” he explained. “If we think the city is in danger of losing a location that’s key to our heritage, we can impose a one-year waiting period on a building where no work can be done.”
But, he added, it’s a limited power. Given how long many projects take, some determined contractors have been known to include the delay in their construction timetables, he said, biding their time and focusing on other aspects of the project until the work ban expires.
In addition to his role as a public servant, David Drake is the headmaster at the White Oak School in Westfield. When asked about the future of the Clarke School campus, he prefaced his remarks by disclosing that as educators, he and Bill Corwin knew each other professionally and considered themselves colleagues, and his school has relied on the Clarke School for services.
Acknowledging the site’s historic importance and confirming he’d spoken with residents who were concerned about what could happen to the campus, Drake has endorsed a wait-and-see approach. Until Clarke announces the results of its RFP and specific plans are disclosed, he said, it is premature to jump to conclusions. Beyond the demolition delay, Drake wasn’t certain what influence the city had over the sale of a private property, even if historic buildings were involved.
Wayne Feiden, Northampton’s city planner, was unequivocal on this point, however. During an interview with the Advocate last week, when asked whether the city could impose an historic district on a privately owned entity, he said that “it can be done with six votes on the City Council.”
Typically, the city manages development through zoning legislation, Feiden explained—in effect, telling private owners what they can and can’t do. On occasion, the Council has stepped in to halt projects, he said, but never before on historical grounds. If an historic structure is being sold, the city prefers to work with the owners on deciding what the “character-defining traits” of the building are and getting them to make the preservation of those traits a stipulation of the sale.
“We did this with the fire station on Masonic Street,” Feiden said of the building that now houses the Woodstar Caf? and the Northampton Media Foundation. “We met with the previous owner, neighbors and concerned residents and decided that the roofline and the tower at the back where they used to dry the hoses were important to preserve, but the old fire truck bays weren’t as essential.”
Such an approach for the Clarke School, Feiden said, would require the owner’s approval, but the other tactics to protect the historically significant buildings would not. The Council could create a custom district through zoning by declaring the area architecturally significant, for instance, or the city could expand the existing, state-recognized Elm Street Historic District up the hill to include the campus.
“To receive the designation as an historic district and the protection that promises,” Feiden said, “I often say that a place needs to tell a story.”
In a meeting held with the Northampton Historical Commission after Drake’s interview with the Advocate, Feiden said the Commission had asked him to begin preliminary work on assembling a study committee to determine the school’s worthiness for such a distinction.
“I’ve got an intern up at Forbes right now,” Feiden said, “digging through the old [Daily Hampshire] Gazettes for everything about Clarke he can find.”
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Not all the buildings on the campus are necessarily historic—the swimming pool was added in 1966 and a garage was built in the ’70s—but at least one building has been on the hill longer than the Clarke, and many of the others are saturated in the kind of history that defines Northampton.
When the Clarke School was founded shortly after the Civil War, education and healing were already booming industries for the city.
Prior to Clarke opening its doors on Round Hill, in 1823 the location had been the home to the famous Round Hill School for Boys. Modeled on German educational principles, the school hoped to offer students a fear-free environment that encouraged a close parent-teacher relationship and mingled study with outdoor adventure and play. The school, which only lasted a little more than a decade, also featured America’s first indoor gymnasium and school gymnastics program.
One of the Round Hill School’s dormitories (originally built in 1802) was used as the Round Hill Water Cure Retreat after the boys’ school left. Three years after it had opened, Clarke School purchased the building in 1870 for its girls’ dormitory, and it’s now known as Rogers Hall. The stately white brick building with a mansard roof has a dignified but unassuming presence on Round Hill Road, but its back side is an impressive edifice of windows gazing out over playing fields toward the Holyoke Range.
The school was founded in response to an offer from local philanthropist John Clarke to grant $50,000 to anyone who would start a school for the deaf in Northampton. At that time, neighboring Smith College was four years from its founding at the bottom of the hill, but on the crest of another hill across town, the Northampton State Hospital had been growing for 10 years under the management of chief physician and superintendent Pliny Earle.
In 1962 Clarke co-founded with Smith College a program which earned teachers a Master’s of Education of the Deaf. Over the years, the school’s board members have included Alexander Graham Bell and both President Calvin Coolidge and First Lady Grace Coolidge.
The presidential pair met, courted and became engaged on the Clarke campus. She had been a teacher at the school, and Calvin, recently out of law school, had taken a room in Adams Hall. The story is that they first met when she was walking by his window and broke out laughing when she spotted him shaving wearing only his union suit and a hat.
But one doesn’t need to turn to Wikipedia or old newspaper clippings to dig up what’s of the greatest historic value at the site. All you need to do is walk the grounds and read the small plaques posted on nearly every tree, shrub, flower bed, building or bench. Everywhere you look, even on the bricks on a newly laid sidewalk, you’ll see the hundreds of names of teachers, administrators, benefactors, and students whose lives have been profoundly transformed for the better on this hilltop—people who likely had hoped their gratitude would be memorialized in and around these buildings for generations to come.
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William Corwin and his wife moved from Seattle to this area in 2001, when their first daughter was diagnosed with a hearing disorder.
“We’d already been planning to move back east, but we weren’t certain where,” Corwin explained. “When we started doing research for schools for Sophia, Clarke stood out head and shoulders above the rest, and we decided to move here.” As it turned out, their youngest daughter’s hearing loss was even greater, and she was fitted with cochlear implants.
Trained as a lawyer, but with a career in educational service administration behind him, William Corwin became president of Clarke in June, 2007. In addition to the changes he’s been helping to make in how the school delivers services, he has been involved in an overhaul and update of its image, including a name change. Instead of being “for the deaf,” the Clarke School is now for “hearing and speech.”
“We’ve put a lot of thought and effort into this entire process,” Corwin said last week, and he seemed cautiously optimistic. For the last few weeks, LandVest had already been taking potential buyers on tours of the buildings.
“I spoke to one of their staff today,” Corwin said, “and they’re feeling pretty good about the interest level. My understanding is that some people who have come through have been tempted, but they say they need more time. Who knows, though? We’ll find out on June 30th.”
Corwin said that the school’s request for proposals is an indication of its intent to proceed in a manner “that’s mindful of the location’s history and is respectful and open to the neighbors, alumni, former staff” and extended community.
“We could have just slapped a ‘for sale’ sign on, and anybody could have come in to buy the place for the right price,” he said. “We wanted hopefully to see a whole breadth of possibilities, so that we could come up with the option that could best help us meet our mission and be good neighbors. We need to evolve, and this is part of our plan for serving families now and into the future.”
While the school is offering a continuous swath of campus for sale, it is divided by a public road, and LandVest documents suggest the property could be sold in two halves. Corwin has said that if the search process finds the right owner for the majority of the buildings, the school may consider holding on to the remainder. But he’s careful to emphasize that anything is possible, and that he didn’t want to predetermine an outcome.
Asked if he has any notion of a dream buyer, Corwin laughed and shrugged. “A good neighbor who wants it all for a good price,” he said.
