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North Adams Group Details Plans for 'Greylock Market'

The new Greylock Market will include activities within and around the courtyard and welcome visitors to Mount Greylock.

NORTH ADAMS, Mass. — Some $6 million in private and public funds will be invested over the next two years in Western Gateway Heritage State Park to capitalize on the growing — and profitable — artisan movement.

The 30-year-old park will be rebranded as "Greylock Market" to tap into its position as a gateway to Mount Greylock State Reservation and to better communicate its retail potential.

"What we have concluded is that the ideal use for Heritage Park is as a mixed-use artisan center," said Blair Benjamin, president of Greylock Market LLC, the investment group formed to undertake the project.

"The artisan economy is taking off," he said, in announcing the plans on Wednesday at City Hall. "We've been watching what's going on in communities around the country, some near and some far."

Benjamin said the park — including the former Sons of Italy property purchased by the city earlier this year, the footbridge (expected to be part of the bike path) to West Main Street, and the two city-owned houses on West Main — will be transformed into a mixed-use center including retail, artisan production spaces, 15-20 residential units and event programming.

Artisans ranging from cheesemongers to woodworkers will be able ply their trades in view of visitors and have access to a central retail marketplace. Longtime tenant Freight Yard Pub would partner with a microbrewery. The residential units will be marketed to artisans, similar to the way Eclipse Mill is marketed to artists, to create a community of artisans.  

The market would also have a cafe or coffee shop and community kitchen, and link to resources including Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Arts, the new Berkshire Scenic Railway rides, the planned extension of the Ashuwillticook Rail Trail and the downtown.

The artisan and crafts movement had a $13.8 billion impact nationwide in 2001 — long before Internet economics (ala Etsy) took off, said Benjamin, adding a 2008 study of western North Carolina found an economic impact of more than $206 million.

He gave the example of the Simon Pearce glass-blowing and pottery center in Vermont. "They get some 300,000 visitors per year to their site in Quechee, Vt., population 656 people," he said.

The vision for Greylock Market has been developed over the past year after the North Adams Development Trust was selected by the city to privatize the languishing property.

"I don't want to say, 'voila!' but it is 'voila!' Here we are and it's just really, really a good day,"  said Mayor Richard Alcombright. The mayor said the city could ill afford the millions required to renovate the aging park.  

"It needed the commercial attention and the retail attention that only private development could give it," he said. "We provide the processes for private industry, for a private developer to come in and do their thing.

"We should not be competing with the private sector."

Its redevelopment rests on a public-private partnership that includes $1.5 million in private investment through Greylock Market LLC and a MassWorks grant of $881,000 that will be used to leverage nearly $4 million in financing.

"What was lacking was private investor capital and a strong vision on how to use this property until now," said Benjamin.

The key in moving the project forward was state participation through the Department of Conservation and Recreation, which operates the visitors center and Hoosac Tunnel museum at the park, and the MassWorks grant that had been held up since being awarded last year.

Colleen Taylor, an owner of the Freight Yard Pub that's been in the park for 25 years, said she was "thrilled by all the energy being directed at this redevelopment."

Taylor has previously expressed support for the project. But the future of the nonprofits currently in the park, including the North Adams Museum of Science and History and Northern Berkshire Community Television Corp., isn't so sanguine.

Above, Blair Benjamin, right, explains the market concept with John DeRosa and Mayor Richard Alcombright. Below, David Bond, left, Joe Thompson and President Mary Grant discussed the park's potential.

"There is likelihood that certain tenants may need to work with the city and the North Adams Partnership to identify another location that might be a better fit for them," said Benjamin. "We need to be able to create a cluster of activity here that has a thematic connection to each other. In some cases that means using the spaces differently."

DCR is expected to remain an essential element in the park and Benjamin said talks are ongoing on how the agency can formulate programming that ties in with the artisan and recreational themes.

Greylock Market will lease the property for 20 years from the city, technically from the Redevelopment Authority, for $750,000 upfront. An agreement that is still being worked out will have to be approved by the Redevelopment Authority.

City Solicitor John DeRosa said it was not unusual for a project of this complexity to take two years in landing investments and articulating agreements considering how difficult it is to "take something from where it was, from concept to design" then package it in a way to find an investment group and put financing together.

"One-point-six million is a terrific investment in North Adams, the likes of which we haven't really seen," he said. "That was difficult to do but the response to it was absolutely phenomenal."

The broad range of investors putting up the money include the management team of Timur F. Galen, managing director of Goldman Sachs, local philanthropist James Hunter and Anders Schroeder, chairman of the Asgard Group. All are members or former members of the Mass MoCA Foundation Board of Directors.  

Benjamin also is connected to Mass MoCA, having managed its commercial real estate arm for some years.

Among the 18 investors who stepped forward to fund the project are local business leaders Nancy Fitzpatrick, Jack Wadsworth and Francis "Bigs" Waterman.

"This is a group of very serious social impact investors who are excited by the opportunity to create some economic opportunities," said Benjamin.

The force behind Greylock Market is the nonprofit Partnership for North Adams made up of DeRosa, Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts President Mary Grant and Mass MoCA Executive Director Joseph Thompson, as well as the mayor. The group formed several years ago to help promote development in the city.

All three expressed confidence in the project and thanked the many partners involved in bringing it to fruition.

"I feel privileged to have had the opportunity to play a catalytic role through the North Adams Partnership in helping everyone coalesce around this vision," said DeRosa. "This is a great project for North Adams. It builds upon the success so far Mass MoCA and MCLA and its exactly where we should be and its an exciting day for North Adams.

Grant expected students from the college to take advantage of the creative opportunities posed by the market, and pointed to the small-business entrepreneurship already on display at the weekend farmers' market.

"It's building on the strength of this city and I think it's such an exciting step forward," she said.

Thompson saw it as a way to attract a dynamic demographic in light of the area's diminishing population.

"If you look at the people who are choosing to stay, more and more are the creative people and the younger people and that's absolutely vital to the future of our hometown."

Students Show Effects of Climate Change in Art Show

By Breanna SteeleiBerkshires Staff
12:46PM / Tuesday, April 21, 2026

Students from 10 area high schools are showing works that reflect on climate change at the Clark Art this week. The exhibit will move to Pittsfield and Sheffield later. 

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — Students got to showcase their art at the Clark Art Institute depicting their relationship with the Earth in the time of climate change.

"How Shall We Live," a juried art exhibit, was on display Saturday in the Clark's Hunter Studio at Stone Hill. Students from 10 high schools participated.

Climate educational organization Cooler Communities has hosted this show for the past couple of years at different venues across the Berkshires. This year, it was approached by the Clark to host the show and is co-organizing with Living the Change Berkshires.

This was the first year Cooler Communities, a program of the Harold Grinspoon Charitable Foundation, changed its prompt to make it more personal for the students in hopes to start a conversation in the classrooms on climate change.

"In our work with Cooler Communities, we want to really make conversations about climate change normal, so it doesn't just happen in high school science or in activist circles, but for everyone to feel like they have a role to play, and for everyone to explore what it means for them," said Executive Director Uli Nagel.

"And so that's why the work of classrooms rather than after-school programs, but actually have it in the classroom and then bring it to the community and connect it to solutions. That's why the community is here, and so we always try to actually make it real, but also give kids the opportunity to explore their own emotions and interior experiences through art."

The Clark wanted to expand on its Sensing Nature Program and give students a higher impact experience instead of just the program tour that could help fit the criteria for the students’ portrait of a graduate.

The show had 74 displays as well as an iPad that showed other students’ art that was not showcased in the show, which was around 180 submissions.

Students were asked to respond to one or more elements in the following prompt:

• What does nature provide?
• What are the Earth's needs?
• What matters most?
• What is resilience?
• Where do you find guidance and inspiration?

Pittsfield High student Stella Carnevale, 16, made her artwork out of newspaper, Mod Podge, chalk, and watercolors. She drew three sardines showing the effect polluted water had on them and wrote in her artist's note that she wants people to pause and feel empathy while also recognizing their role in protecting the natural world.

"Fish are vital to our world. They balance ecosystems, feed communities, and remind us how deeply connected life on Earth is. When our waters are polluted, fish are often the first to suffer, and their disappearance signals a greater loss that affects us all," she wrote. "Pollution doesn't just damage rivers and oceans; it threatens food sources, cultures, and the health of the planet itself. I make art to bring attention to what is quietly being taken away."

She said it was really cool to see her art hanging in the Clark and never thought it would happen.

Wahconah Regional High student, Alexandra Rougeau, 18, painted a jellyfish in acrylics.

"I started off making a different painting that was very depressing, obviously, because it's climate change, and I got really annoyed because everything was so negative," she said. "And although climate change is a really negative part of the world right now, I want to try to show that there is some hope in it. And that we do have some hope in saving our environment. So the jellyfish is meant to depict fire, global warming, but it's in the ocean and it's rising up, and there is some hope, hopefully at the top, in the surface."

Rougeau said it is an honor to be chosen to have her art here and to see all the other depictions from other students.

Monument Mountain High sophomore Siddy Culbreth painted a landscape in oil pastels and said he was inspired by his grandfather who is a landscaper and wanted to depict "what we should save."

"I was picturing this as a quintessential, it's kind of like epitome of what a nice landscape should be like," he said. "And so in terms of climate change, like how that is kind of shifting, or what our idea of like the world is shifting. And I feel like it's really important to preserve what, like, almost not a perfect world, but, what the world should be like."

Some students from Pittsfield High in Colleen Quinn's ceramics class created a microscopic look of what they thought PCBs looked like and wanted to depict how the polychlorinated biphenyls might have affected them at Allendale Elementary, near disposal site Hill 37. 

Quinn said she is very proud of all her students. 

The show is at the Clark until April 26 and is free and open to the public. It will be moved to Pittsfield City Hall to run from May 1 through June 8, and then to Sheffield's Dewey Hall from June 12 through 21.

It is made possible with support from the Feigenbaum Foundation, Lee Bank, and Greylock Federal Credit Union.