HARDWICK — In the spring of 2022, fledgling community-building organization The Civic Standard, took up residence in the oldest structure on Hardwick’s Main Street: the vacant longtime Hardwick Gazette building.
photo courtesy of The Civic Standard
The group turned the space into what Rose Friedman, executive director and co-founder of the Civic, referred to in a recent interview as a “kind of living room on Main Street-like gathering space that’s very cozy and informal and kinda funky.”
At its headquarters, Friedman said, the nonprofit hosts everything from free weekly community suppers to twice-monthly old-time jam sessions, a recent chili cook-off to a “tremendous” number of organizing meetings for the group’s popular theater performances and other events such as the upcoming “Hardwick State,” a town-wide, weekend-long free pop-up university.
The Civic focuses on “grand and tiny experiments in getting together,” its website states, and has received state and national publicity and acclaim for its innovative work in rural community revitalization.
Recently, however, much of the organization’s discussions have been focused on the fate of its building, which needs a number of costly and urgent repairs.
photo courtesy The Civic Standard
The historic structure, built in 1850 and perched on the bank of the Lamoille River, sits in the floodway. Its foundation suffered serious damage during the last two summers of severe flooding. While the Civic has funding in place to anchor the foundation, the group would also need to complete painting and roof repair projects just to meet the insurance company’s requirements, not to mention the myriad of other repairs needed to make the building safe, accessible, efficient and up to code.
“It’s a wildly sloping building right along the river, so it definitely makes some people really nervous,” Friedman said.
At a select board meeting late last month, the Hardwick Select Board approved the Civic’s request that the building be added to a Federal Emergency Management Agency buyout program which would cover the costs of demolishing the structure and returning the property to green space and flood plain. However, Friedman emphasized to the board that the Civic has not yet decided if it will go through with the buyout, but wanted to get into the program in case that option is the community consensus. The program is structured to allow the group to back out at a later date.
“We’re in a funny place right now where we’re holding all the possibilities of what could or should happen next and, at some point, something is going to have to be the thing that we’re moving towards,” Friedman said. “But right now, we’re still in that, like, information collecting, nothing has had to be fully committed to in a way that we can’t back away from.”
In a recent newsletter, the Civic described several potential paths forward: staying and repairing the building either just enough to secure it or fixing it more completely, in order to make it usable for years to come. Or, the group could move to another building in town (preferably on Main Street) while either renting out the historic structure, putting it on the market for another organization to repair, or going ahead with the buyout and demolition.
According to Friedman, the executive director, the Civic has received a lot of thoughtful feedback since sending out the newsletter about the issue a month ago, including ideas about what to do as well as ways of thinking about how to make the decision. Some respondents suggested different ways of viewing the building’s place in history or viewing the organization’s work in relation to a physical space.
“There’s many possibilities for it outside of our relationship with it, which is tiny in the life of the building,” she said. “I mean, it was the newspaper headquarters for a hundred years, before that it was a dry goods shop . . . it goes back even before the records even existed.”
At the February 20 selectboard meeting, Friedman told the board that much of the feedback the Civic had received was along the lines of “we’d be really sad to see it go, but totally understand.”
