Springfield’s notorious riverfront prison, a late-1800s brick building complex, is slated for demolition, with interior remediation work to begin this month including the painstaking removal of asbestos and likely lead paint.
North American Site Development Corp. of Waltham will handle the demolition job that was put out to bid with the engineering bid-specification assistance of Tighe & Bond (services reported by the Republican at a cost of $72,000). Estimated between $1.5 to $1.8 million for the demolition, the winning bid came in at $1.24 million. Explaining the low bid, the city’s CDO David Panagore told reporter Peter Goonan, “The market is hungry for activity.”
Last spring, in collaboration with site project manager MassDevelopment (at a reported fee of $46,000), the city’s Office of Planning and Economic Development received a commissioned report from Arrowstreet Inc., an architectural firm based in Somerville, focusing on the former jail complex—16 buildings on just over three acres—and its potential for adaptive re-use.
“There’s a sense out there that maybe the building could be re-used,” Panagore told me in late June. “The work to date since the city got the building—attempted to sell it twice, and given its general condition—the common wisdom is that the building can’t be re-used. Certainly, I’m not surprised by that. That’s where I came into this, leading up to the [Urban Land Institute] saying, don’t do another study, tear it down.”
So what led to a re-use study?
“What we’re proving is the concept,” Panagore explained. “We’re not ‘doing another study’; we are proving. We’re showing that if you took the amount of money in the budget to do the tear-down and put it back into the building—what we’re hearing from our folks is that it would just basically stabilize the building. It would be sucked up into the building, and all it would do is stop the clock.”
For the full story, go here. (Space does not permit publishing the entire story in this blog, as posts are now mysteriously cut off at a certain word length.)
