Watch the Planning Board hearing on Thursday November 14, 2024 at 7:30 p.m.
After two decades in ruins, Mary Austen Hall, once home to a prestigious nursing school at Orange Memorial Hospital, could be saved and become Orange’s new City Hall.
The ambitious plan to renovate the 1928 building was revealed last month at a three-hour Planning Board hearing that continues tomorrow. Only one other building on the hospital’s nine-building campus – the power house building and its well-known smokestack, built in 1912 – will be spared.
It comes as good news to residents who feared these buildings would be demolished after the hospital’s closure in 2005, which brought with it crime and vagrancy to the neighborhood.
“We’re trying to provide a center for the community to safely gather, work, play, and live,” said Nicholas Hill, senior project manager at Niles Bolton Associates.
“The plan celebrates Mary Austen Hall and the boiler house by making them focal points,” Hill said. “It brings them back to life with new uses and rehabilitated facades.”
But saving Mary Austen Hall will come at a significant cost. Seven of the nine historic buildings on the hospital’s campus, all listed on the National Register, will be torn down. Earlier this year, Preservation New Jersey named the hospital one of the state’s most endangered places.
“We walked every building from the ground floor to the roof tops – we tried to really understand what could be saved, what could be preserved,” said Terrence Murray, managing partner at Gateway Merchant Banking, one of the investors. “Unfortunately the answer that continued to come back is not much.”
Among the structures that will be demolished are the North Building, opened in 1908, the oldest edifice at the hospital, and the Medical and Surgical Building, opened in 1929, the largest and perhaps the most recognizable building.
In place of these demolished structures, the developer will construct five apartment buildings, bringing 1,005 residential units, a park, an ice-skating rink, an amphitheater, and parking garages with 1,246 spaces.
The reasons Murray gave for demolishing the buildings include the existence of asbestos and the inability to convert existing hospital rooms into contemporary residential use because of their “narrow” dimensions. But these reasons are insufficient to warrant demolition, according to Jody Leight, a real estate attorney and local preservationist.
“I don’t doubt that the building has asbestos and lead, but that has no bearing on whether the buildings can be saved,” said Leight, who lives only steps from the hospital. “They would have to remediate the asbestos and lead in an environmentally safe manner whether the buildings are to be saved or demolished.”
Leight argued that although the buildings are listed on the National Register, the developer still has free rein to reconfigure the interior floor plans. “Wouldn’t they be doing a gut rehab if they were preserving the buildings?” she said.
The demolition of any National Register-listed building that is part of a public-private partnership must be approved by the State Historic Preservation Office. Typically, the only reason the council of historians and architects will accept is the structural instability of the building. The developer hasn’t appeared before the state office yet and the project doesn’t appear on SHPO’s upcoming agenda.
The plan will likely encounter resistance from the local Historic Preservation Commission, whose members have been steeling themselves over the past few years for such an occasion. Chris Hartwyk, the city’s business administrator, and Mayor Dwayne Warren have both signaled – once at a City Council meeting and again at a mayoral debate this year – that demolition would be a part of the plan, but neither provided more details.
Karen Wells, town historian and member of the HPC, who usually minces no words on the subject of saving the historic district, was a bit more measured in her response to the presentation. “Are they going to bring this proposal to the Historic Preservation Commission?” Wells said. “That’s what we would like to know.”
A coalition of local residents, religious leaders, and organizations, including the HUUB, the University of Orange, and Ebenezer Baptist Church, have criticized the proposal for not including the public’s feedback.
“A poorly executed development plan will increase physical disconnection in the city, contribute to the exorbitant rise in housing costs, increase dangers related to traffic and pollution, and overburden our school system,” reads part of an open letter.
Missed the last Town Hall meeting? Watch here.
