There is, in the heart of Greenwich, a district that is less a location than a statement. It is the civic core: a cluster of buildings and monuments arrayed along Greenwich Avenue, designated a National Historic District and developed between 1893 and 1938. Here are situated the obelisk memorializing the town’s World War I dead, the statue of Col. Raynal Bolling, and, soon by all accounts, a likeness of President George H.W. Bush, Greenwich native and forty-first president.
Amid this architecture of memory stands the Havemeyer Building, erected in the 1890s and once a school. It is now used by the Board of Education as administrative office space. This is regrettable, not because administrative work lacks dignity, but because the building—donated for public benefit— is being used in a manner both inefficient and indifferent to its potential.
It is falling apart while housing filing cabinets.
The public understands this. Feedback on Anne Semmes’s recent article has been vigorous and one-sided. In meetings, letters, conversations in grocery store lines and coffee shops, the sentiment is consistent: this building was a gift to the people, and it ought to serve a public purpose of higher civic value than administrative use and record storage.
For decades now, a trio of civic-minded preservationists—Peter Malkin, Bea Crumbine, and Chuck Royce—have advocated a more fitting use. They propose transforming the Havemeyer Building into a performing arts center. The design is detailed. The financing, partially pledged. The impact, potentially enormous.
The architect Peter Gisolfi once examined the space and noted that each classroom—thick-walled and well-proportioned—would serve splendidly as a music rehearsal room. The main theater could hold 250 to 300 seats. Crumbine, in consultation with theater designers, proposed rotating the theater to maximize sound and sightlines, citing the human eye’s limit of 74 feet for facial recognition onstage. The plan included rehearsal space, a smaller performance wing, and even facilities for schools of pottery, ballet, and music.
There is precedent. Royce’s black box theater at the Ocean House in Rhode Island accommodates lectures, performances, and fashion shows with seating that comes and goes depending on the event. The same design, nearly to the foot, could work in the right wing of Havemeyer.
To objections about parking, Crumbine answered pragmatically: performances would be held at night, when Town Hall’s parking lot is empty. A shuttle, she said, would suffice.
To the question of where the current Board of Education staff would go, John Fareri offered 20 years of free office space elsewhere in town. The response? Rejected. The site was not permanent enough nor close enough to Greenwich Avenue. Really?
That objection, in particular, hints at the problem. Inertia.
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil,” Edmund Burke warned, “is for good men to do nothing.” The problem in Greenwich is not evil. It is entrenchment. The good people involved have done a great deal: plans drafted, money pledged, letters sent, patience exercised. But the space remains misused.
Fareri even proposed residential construction atop underground parking—an idea that would fund the arts wing while adding 185 parking spaces and 50 more at street level. The boutique hotel concept was dismissed, even derided. One hotelier said the idea was “insane.” Greenwich, after all, is not starved for beds. It is starved for culture and a real nightlife downtown.
The dream is not a fantasy. It is a plan. It is engineered. It is drawn up. It is ready. What remains is for the Town to act—finally—to relocate the Board of Education staff and permit the structure to be used in accordance with its location, its architecture, and its legacy.
A downtown should not merely exist. It should hum. It should invite and involve. It should enrich.
Let the Havemeyer Building become a place where that happens.
