A 2-year-old proposal for a mixed-use facility on the old Bird Hall clock tower site in East Walpole will reappear largely unchanged before town boards by the fall, said the lawyer for the site's owner.
The future of the 72-foot-tall clock tower - the only remnant of Bird Hall after a 1995 fire - is uncertain.
The new proposal may include plans to raze the historic timepiece, said Phil Macchi, the Norwood lawyer representing Hollingsworth & Vose. Whether the clock tower stays depends on factors such as its structural soundness, Macchi said.
"Everyone likes the clock," he said, but examination may show it to be structurally deficient. The decision will come only after the completion of final architectural plans, he said.
"We just don't know if it's salvageable at this point," Macchi said.
The old plan for the acre-plus site - at the corner of Washington and Chestnut streets - called for a 17,412-square-foot, three-story building. The bottom floor would have been devoted to offices and the top two to apartments.
The new plan will be similar, Macchi said. The first floor would be occupied by offices, stores or a restaurant; the second and third floors by eight to 10 apartments.
The old plan needed updating because of the rewrite of the zoning bylaws that the town undertook between winter 2006 and spring Town Meeting in March - when the revision passed easily. Waiting for that rewrite kept the plan in limbo, Macchi said.
The owners didn't want to get halfway through the approval process only to find that a new zoning bylaw required changes, he added. As a result, John Anderson and Associates, the Walpole architecture firm working on the plans, waited until the revision passed Town Meeting to make changes to the building's design.
The changes include bringing the number and area of the proposed parking spaces in line with the updated bylaw, Macchi said.
In January 2007, the Zoning Board of Appeals approved the project with little opposition, Macchi said. It still must go before the Planning Board and Conservation Commission.
Last fall, the town celebrated the completion of a four-year, $1 million Public Works Economic Development (PWED) grant at the clock tower building. The state-financed project enabled the town to make several improvements, aesthetically and for safety reasons, to the East Walpole neighborhood near the Bird building.
Jason Skypeck, whose home on Union Street abuts the site, said information regarding the plans has been hard to come by.
"As an abutter to the proposed project, I am concerned because I don't have information on the details of the building they plan to construct, and how it impacts my property," Skypeck wrote in an e-mail. "As a member of the (East Walpole Civic Association), I am excited to see the piece of land utilized because it has been an eyesore for over a decade."
Bird Hall was built in 1884 and was known as the "pride of East Walpole." According to the book, "Images of America: Walpole," construction on the clock tower began in 1894 as a memorial to paper manufacturer and abolitionish state senator Francis W. Bird, who died that year. Bird was a Walpole industrialist who founded Bird Machine Co.
Jeb Bobseine can be reached at jeb@walpoletimes.com or 508-668-0243, ext. 13.
