Merrimack River Current
 
 

No room at the inn

By Rob Marino
Friday, May 30, 2003


Waterfront battle blazed at firehouse in effort to avert hotel, condo development

The only historic building within the urban renewal project area that wasn't acquired by the Newburyport Redevelopment Authority in the 1960s was the old fire station, since it was still occupied by the city's fire department.

Once the home of the Market House, built in the early 1820s, the landmark today is the home of the Firehouse Center for the Arts. Just as Newburyport grappled with public access to the waterfront in the 1960s and 1970s, the issue would come back to haunt the community in the 1980s, with the old fire station at the center of another battle.

NRA member Laura Rowe wasn't on the redevelopment authority in the '80s, but she was a city councilor during that time and founded the Firehouse Committee to preserve public access to the historic landmark.

In the early 1980s, the NRA selected a development proposal for the waterfront that included a 100-plus room hotel and a 76-unit condominium complex. The proposed developers of the project assured that the old fire station, which was vacated by the Fire Department in the late 1970s, would be a restored community building, Rowe says, including a museum, art gallery and meeting rooms. The plans ultimately were changed, removing the community building component.

"The latest project design showed the firehouse as a restaurant and meeting rooms for the hotel," Rowe says, adding this prompted the formation of the Firehouse Committee. "They eliminated the public space. We were not too happy with that."

Despite cries of protest from the community, the NRA ultimately pledged to support the altered plans, which included the construction of a glass arcade leading from the proposed hotel to the fire station, Rowe says. While the NRA maintained that the corridor would not obstruct the use of the waterfront and the view of the river, others disagreed.

And there was a bigger sticking point: the NRA didn't yet have possession of the firehouse. The City Council voted to sell the firehouse to the NRA so it could be conveyed to the developers. But when Rowe contacted the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the federal agency agreed that such a transaction would be illegal.

"When the plan was passed, the firehouse was still being used, which meant that it could not be acquired even at a later date unless a major revision was made to the plan," Rowe says. "Mayor Dick Sullivan was stinking mad when he found out, because he really thought that this was going to go through."

The developers were forced to redesign the project, and in the meantime, the city was trying to get a law passed by the Legislature granting Newburyport longer lease terms for renting public buildings, Rowe says.

In the mid-1980s, the Firehouse Committee wanted the City Council to rescind its decision to sell the building to the NRA, and gathered enough signatures to satisfy the requirements for a ballot question on the matter. However, George Lawlor, city clerk at the time, questioned the validity of the referendum question and refused to place it on the ballot, prompting the committee to file a lawsuit in Superior Court, Rowe says. The case was never heard in Superior Court because it was pulled for review by the Supreme Judicial Court, since the question of what constitutes a valid referendum question had been popping up in other court cases.

The Supreme Judicial Court ruled in favor of the committee, ordering that the question be placed on the ballot or the City Council rescind its vote, Rowe says. The council ultimately rescinded its vote.

"The NRA did one smart thing with this request for proposals," Rowe says about the ill-fated project. "They always insisted that the hotel be built first, then condos."

Rowe says many in the community suspected that the proposed developer never really had sufficient funding to build a hotel. HUD denied granting the development firm federal funding for the project because of the lack of sufficient financial information in its application. The developer's insistence to build the condos further fueled people's suspicions.

In the end, the developers walked.

"It was a clear indication that they had no intention of building a hotel," Rowe says. "They could have built the condos and walked. They were quite unhappy, because they were not allowed to start with the condos."

No vacancy

A few years later, the NRA went through a new round of requests for proposals for the waterfront and selected developer Roger Foster, whose plan included a 123-room hotel. In 1987, a referendum was held in which three questions were drawn up by the Committee for an Open Waterfront, Rowe says. The first question asked voters if they were in favor of a hotel on one side of the redevelopment property and condos on the other side, while the second question asked voters if they were in favor of a hotel on one side and an expanded park and landscaping on the other.

It was the third question that won the majority of the vote, with the community favoring an expanded park and parking - and no hotel construction.

Despite the vote, NRA moved forward with Foster's hotel plan, Rowe says. Through abutters of the project, the committee appealed the zoning board's approval of variances for the proposed development, because the waterfront committee believed the variances were granted illegally. An alternate member of the board who was against granting the variances was replaced prior to the hearing by a member in favor of the variances - although it was the alternate member's turn to serve on the board the night of the hearing.

"There was a lot of hanky-panky as to which alternates would sit in on that hearing," Rowe says. Ultimately, the board voted in favor, 4-1, to grant the variances. If the alternate member were to have served on the board during the hearing, the vote would have been 3-2; not enough to okay the variances.

A Superior Court judge ruled in favor of the zoning board, which then prompted an appeal by the committee. However, fortune smiled on the project's opponents when the judge who had been taping the court proceedings so they could be typed lost several of the tapes.

"He had no written court records of the testimony, and it took years to restore it," Rowe says. In the end, the Massachusetts Court of Appeals concurred with the Superior Court ruling and the committee lost the case.

At that point, NRA began having its own difficulties with Foster, and decided the development contract was invalid because it had not been approved by HUD, and so another legal battle began. The court case went to state Superior Court in 1992.

In 1999, Judge Richard Welsh ruled in favor of NRA, prompting Foster to appeal the decision. However, Foster ultimately signed an agreement to dismiss the case and the appeal was dropped in March 2002.

On a side note, Bob Harris, lawyer of the former Friends of the Newburyport Waterfront group, points out that when the firehouse was rebuilt prior to becoming the arts center, the back of the structure was over-extended onto Market Landing Park. "We accepted that it was a good faith mistake," Harris says.

A current member of the NRA, Rowe offers an interesting perspective since she didn't always agree with the entity's decisions over the past several decades, as well as the decisions made by previous mayoral administrations and city officials.

"For 14 years, I fought them tooth and nail," she says. "They were bound and determined to do what they wanted to do, and they did not think they needed to answer to the opinions of the community at all. They were pretty arrogant in those days."

 

 
(This article replicated online with permission of the Merrimack River Current.)
 
 
Site Design by Bright iDear   Copyright © 2002-2014 All Rights Reserved
Website: www.BrightiDear.com  Email: Bright-iDear@comcast.net