Opinion: The Wildwood Solution

There has been much talk about a “Wildwood solution” as Art Keene reminded us in a comment last week.  However, that talk has been in the Indy, so town government is obliged to pretend it doesn’t exist.  Council President Lynn Griesemer has said that it is too soon to consider the future of Wildwood School, and besides, its rehabilitation would be too expensive.

I was reminded of this recent history this week by Nick Grabbe’s commentary in The Amherst Current in which he compares the Amherst Senior Center to the new Hadley Senior Center, to Amherst’s vast disadvantage.  Many Amherst seniors are using the newer, more spacious, and more accessible senior centers in Hadley, South Hadley, and Northampton (where I am a member).

The Town Hall and Town Council) do not want to talk about Wildwood, and my assumption is that the builders and developers who currently have the most powerful voices in town want and expect the town eventually to sell the Wildwood site for private development; “get it off the books,” is the phrase most often used to express the town’s position.  The Bangs building is called our community center and there are valiant efforts to make it seem like one, not least by the staff and volunteers of the Senior Center.  But as its users will attest, it is a difficult and unattractive building to use and to get to.

In the meantime, work is beginning on the new school at the Fort River site and   expectations are that it will open as a school in the fall of 2026.  That will leave the Wildwood plant vacant and there are many ideas circulating about how it can best serve the town.  None of those ideas involve selling it for private development.  Instead, the talk involves transforming it into a genuine community center with the essential elements a community center must have, including multiple spaces on one level, ease of access and ease of free parking.

I do not here wish to adjudicate among these ideas, other than to indicate that a new senior center and a youth empowerment center are among the most often mentioned.  But it is hardly too late for the town to consider the Wildwood option, to solicit resident opinion, to look at floor plans, and to realize the potential it has to serve as a community center for a community that right now has no center, either physically or symbolically.  The building is 55 years old; rehabbing and redesigning will cost money.  That’s a principal reason to start the discussions right now. 

I grew up in a town with a community house with an auditorium, a gym, a senior center, a teen center and who knows what else.  I moved to Amherst in 1970, the same year that Wildwood opened.  At the time, I didn’t like it as the design for a school and I still don’t.  But its potential to be a community center – one that would help us recreate a sense of community –  is huge.   There are many constituencies in town with ideas about Wildwood, and it is incumbent on the Town Council to start, to engage, to encourage, and and eventually to support a Wildwood Community Center.

Michael Greenebaum was Principal of Mark’s Meadow School from 1970 to 1991, and from 1974 taught Organization Studies in the Higher Education Center at the UMass School of Education.  He served in Town Meeting from 1992, was on the first Charter Commission in 1993, and served on several town committees including the Town Commercial Relations Committee and the Long Range Planning Committee.