Consulting Parties Again Fail to Agree on How Much Historic Preservation is Needed for Jones Library Expansion

Report on the Meeting of the Jones Library Building Committee, January 27, 2025

The meeting was held over Zoom and was recorded. At the outset, there were 44 members of the public and 18 panelists present. Others joined throughout the two-hour meeting.  

The meeting was the second gathering of consulting parties (CP) for the town’s Section 106 Review for the Jones Library Expansion Project. As was the case at the first consulting parties meeting on October 9, 2024, the participants did not agree on how much historic preservation is necessary for the Jones Library building which was constructed in 1928 and is on the federal and state registers of historic places.  The purpose of this meeting was to consider proposals for ameliorating adverse effects (see below) of the proposed expansion on the historic character of the library.

Representatives of the Jones Library, Amherst College, UMass, The Downtown Business Improvement District, The Amherst Area Chamber of Commerce, Ancestral Bridges, the Strong House Museum, and the Emily Dickinson Museum used their time to extol the virtues of the expansion and to challenge the claim that any additional historical preservation efforts were necessary. Representatives from three historic preservation organizations, the Amherst Historical Commission, The Local Historic District Commission, and The Amherst Historic Preservation Coalition, offered specific suggestions for interventions that could ameliorate the identified adverse effects. Public comment mirrored this division with supporters of the project speaking almost exclusively about the way the expanded library will address current needs within the town and ways that historic preservation mandates are getting in the way of meeting those needs, and preservationists suggesting ways that the plans might be altered to protect the historical integrity of the building. 

The town had recently agreed to two design changes requested by the Massachusetts Historical Commission (MHC) that they had previously rejected. The town had originally proposed to replace the slate roof on the 1928 building with synthetic slate and to cut a hole in the stone façade near the front entrance to accommodate a book sorting machine. The MHC objected to both proposals and the town ultimately agreed to change its plans and use real slate for the roof and eliminate the book sorting machine and the opening in the façade that it required.

However, during discussion of the consulting parties, Kent Faerber, Co-chair of the Jones Capital Campaign, who at the previous meeting had asserted that no changes to the plans would be acceptable, stated that the book sorting machine had not been dropped from the plans and would be purchased at a later date. This seemed to leave unresolved the question of whether a hole would be cut in the front façade and whether the town’s previous acquiescence to the MHC’s request would be honored. Andrea Bono-Bunker, the Building Consultant for the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners (MBLC), also asserted that the book sorter would be added in the future, although it was unclear why the MBLC was participating in a meeting of Consulting Parties (which it is not).

The stated purpose of the meeting was to consider proposals to address the remaining adverse effects:

• the massing of the building and its impact on viewscapes of the historic building, the historic district within which it resides and the neighboring North Prospect Historic District.
• The proposed destruction of 20-25% of the historic millwork, hand crafted from rare Philippine mahogany.  The figure is an estimate and has been disputed by critics of the plan. A final inventory of what millwork will be preserved and what will be destroyed has yet to be provided.
• The removal of some historic wall fabric from the 1928 building 
• Architectural incompatibility of the old and new buildings

A portion of the meeting was to have been dedicated to a dialogue about the proposed interventions but there was no engagement among the consulting parties on the interventions that were suggested. Participants were markedly divided between those advocating for moving the project forward expeditiously and those advocating for addressing the remaining adverse effects.

What Happens Next?
The town will file a report with the Advisory Council for Historic Preservation (ACHP), the federal body that oversees Section 106 reviews, and the ACHP will decide whether they will participate further in the process. The town will draft a Memorandum of Agreement (MOA), incorporating input from the consulting parties and the public. The MOA will stipulate the actions it will take to ameliorate adverse effects. The draft MOA will circulate among the consulting parties who will have the opportunity to comment. The state historic preservation officer, Brona Simon, Executive Director of the MHC will have to sign off on the memo before it can be passed on to federal authorities.

Simon, who attended this meeting (but not the first meeting where she did not receive an invitation to participate) noted that the MHC had not yet drafted their conclusions and was looking forward to further consultation with interested parties to resolve these remaining adverse effects.

A timeline for completing next steps was not discussed.

Background
The purpose of the consulting parties meetings was for the town to receive input from consulting parties and the general public on possible interventions to ameliorate the impact of adverse effects of the Jones Library Expansion Project to the historic character of the Jones library. Those adverse effects had previously been acknowledged by the town.  A Section 106 Review is required because the Jones is listed on the National and State Registers of historic places and because the Jones demolition/expansion project is slated to receive state and federal grants that require a Section 106 review.

Section 106 consulting parties may include historical societies, preservation societies, local governments, historic neighborhood representatives, landowners, and other residents with an interest in the project or concern about the project’s effect on historic properties. Satisfactory completion of this review is required in order for the town to receive roughly $2 million in grants that have been tentatively awarded to the town from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).  Those funds can be released only after the State Historic Preservation Officer (SHPO) has accepted a Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) with the town, specifying how the project’s adverse effects will be eliminated, minimized, or mitigated, and after that MOA has been accepted by HUD and NEH.

The $46 million project involves the demolition of the entire 15,000 sq. ft. 1993 addition and the construction of a new addition of about 25,000 sq. ft.  – expanding the size of the library to 61,000 sq. ft. The project will also include long deferred repairs to the 1928 building, including the installation of a new HVAC system, fire suppression system, and replacement of the roof and windows.

Twenty organizations and representatives of four First Nations were invited to participate in the review and to offer input on the town’s findings that the proposed demolition and renovation project had adverse effects on the historic character of the 1928 library and to give feedback from the perspective of their organizations. Each consulting organization was allowed to send two representatives to speak on their organization’s behalf at each of the two CP meetings. The meetings were open to the public and time was set aside for public comment. Twelve representatives from 13 consulting organizations and 20 members of the public spoke at the second meeting.

The Consulting Parties
The Following Consulting Parties participated in this meeting.

Advisory Council Historic Preservation
Amherst Area Chamber of Commerce
Amherst Business Improvement District
Amherst College Center for Community Engagement
Amherst College Frost Library
Amherst Historic Commission
Amherst Historical Preservation Coalition
Amherst History Museum (Strong House)
Ancestral Bridges
Friends of Jones Library
Jones Library
Jones Library’s Burnett Gallery
Jones Library Special Collections
Massachusetts Historical Commission
The Literacy Project
UMass Office of University Relations

Also participating as panelists were Town Manager Paul Bockelman, Amherst Special Capital Projects Coordinator Robert Peirent and two representatives from the MBLC: Director, Maureen Amyot and Building Consultant Andrea Bono Bunker

The Discussion
The agenda set aside 90 minutes for CP’s to share ideas and propose alternative interventions and then to pose questions among themselves about those interventions but there was little give and take.

For Moving Forward Expeditiously
A common position among those advocating for expediency was that the planners had already done enough. Many argued that the planners have already given considerable thought to preservation throughout the design process and have preserved as much as they could of the historic building while allowing for updating and expanding the library to meet the current needs of the community.  Several spoke of striking a balance between old and new. Some trivialized the adverse effects still under consideration, noting that the benefits to be gained from moving forward quickly far outweighed what would be sacrificed and that the ongoing deliberations were causing harmful delays that jeopardized the entire project. Some noted that there had been many changes to the historic building over the last nearly 100 years and that the proposed changes are just part of an ongoing process of building evolution, that the Jones is not a museum, and that the proposed renovations are necessary if it is to function as a modern library. Some noted that the Jones is substantially used by college students, especially those at Amherst College and failure to complete the expansion would be a disservice to them.  And it was argued that an expanded library was essential to promoting a vibrant downtown, would substantially increase foot traffic in the downtown area,  and that the economic benefits to the town far outweigh the remaining possible impacts on the historic building.

For Accommodating Historic Preservation Mandates
In contrast to those opposing further changes to the plans, most of those advocating for addressing preservation concerns argued that what is permissible is dictated by law and regulation and that those restrictions were known to the sponsors from the outset and should have been incorporated into the design process early on, rather than as a last minute consideration. Many called for a redesign of the addition resulting in a building of proper size and scale and of greater architectural compatibility with the historic building and citing the recent renovation and expansion of the 1893 North Amherst Library as a noteworthy example of elegant integration of old and new.

Nearly all pointed to the massing of the addition which they deemed of inappropriate scale that dwarfed the historic building and which would detrimentally and permanently alter the historic viewscape of the downtown and adjoining historic district. The intervention they offered was a redesign of smaller scale and of greater architectural compatibility, or an elimination of the addition and its requisite demolition of the 1993 addition – instead, renovating within the existing footprint as had been proposed in the 2015 report by Anna Popp, to meet the modern needs of the Amherst community.  Some noted that the environmental costs of the demolition including the impact of depositing more than 100 tons of demolition debris in a landfill had yet to be determined.  And several speakers pointed to the planned removal of between 20-25% of the building’s millwork, noting that it is historically unique and in good condition and according to the library’s own historic structures report, contributes significantly to the historic character of the building. It was also noted that the library is one of a few remaining librarys designed to feel like a home (often referred to as the town’s living room) and that the planned removal of interior walls would erase that original intent. Alternatives offered included eliminating plans to remove some interior walls. 

While most of the preservation advocates called for reducing the size of the addition, Andrea Bono-Bunker, representing the MBLC, stated emphatically that no further reductions in the size of the addition are allowable under the terms of the MBLC’s $16 million grant “because they would interfere with the workflow efficiencies that we require to be built in.“