St. Joe Convent Demolished in Pittsfield
PITTSFIELD, Mass. — The former convent at St. Joseph's Church was reduced to a pile of rubble on Monday.
The demolition comes six years after the Diocese of Springfield said it had run out of options for the vacant structure and nearly six months after the Community Development Board overrode a recommendation to halt the razing.
The 118-year-old building demise became a driving force behind the Historical Commission's pursuit of greater authority over the fate of the city's many vintage buildings. This past August, the City Council approved the commission's ability to enact a 12-month demolition delay.
The four-story Victorian convent was something of a landmark on North Street, sitting to the south side of the 1866 St. Joseph's Church. The brick edifice was designed by James Murphy of Providence, R.I., who also designed St. Thomas Aquinas in Adams and Notre Dame in North Adams.
The 69,696 square-foot structure had originally been used as an academy, which later became Our Lady of the Elms in Chicopee, and then was used as a convent until closing in 1981. Hillcrest Educational Centers was located there for a time and the Sisters of Visitation used it in the mid-1990s.
Since then, it had been used primarily for storage as it was unheated and no longer being maintained. At one point, the diocese had considered razing it to make way for a parish center that was eventually built behind it. The proximity of the church and parish center made its reuse difficult and officials had initially estimated upwards of $800,000 to renovate it some years ago. But newer building codes pushed that into the millions, they said.
Concern over the loss of the building led the Historical Commission to invoke only its third demolition delay since gaining that power in 2007. The first was for the former Plunkett School demolished in 2014 and the second for the former Crane & Co. warehouse that has been renovated into a medical clinic.
The commission's recommendation for a six-month delay, the longest it could call for at the time, was rejected by the Community Development Board a couple months later. Commissioners have felt that a longer delay would give developers and others more time to come up with options to save historic buildings.
Tags: demolition, historic buildings, religious building,
