Hardwick’s community-building organization The Civic Standard has spent the better part of the past year weighing what to do with its dilapidated headquarters in the oldest building on Main Street. The group has enlisted experts to assess its structure, applied for funding and solicited input from anyone and in any way they could.
In the end, the answer turned out to be right across the street.
In early September, the three-year-old nonprofit, which specializes in “grand and tiny experiments in getting together,” purchased a three-story building at 39 S. Main St. The structure, built in the 1920s, was most recently a flower shop put on the market because the owner needed to move closer to their family, the business owner said in a social media post. Prior, the space had a long life as a grocery store.
The new building not only meets the Civic’s needs, “but allows us the space to dream far beyond them,” the nonprofit wrote in a newsletter announcing the purchase. “We imagine family-style meals at long dining tables, more accessible live music performances, an upstairs café run by local teenagers after school, a year-round costume library, ample studio space for the creation of new shows, and on goes the list of dreams.”
Civic co-founder and Executive Director Rose Friedman said earlier this month that it feels like a big leap for the young organization to make mortgage payments (the building cost $352,000). However, she noted that the community support for the Civic has “made it really clear that there is widespread valuing of what we offer, which is a pretty simple mission to get people together, often with this commitment to low-barrier, accessible programming for all the kinds of people in our community.”
Historically, the organization’s work has included everything from “Hardwick State,” a townwide, weekend-long free pop-up university, to game nights and facilitating the creation of a local skate park. The group also produces theater performances by, for and about Hardwick. This past weekend, the Civic wrapped up five sold-out performances of an “immersive soap opera” which explored the “unspoken tensions” that exist in town through a fictional wedding between a young woman who grew up in Hardwick and a young man from Connecticut who grew up summering on Lake Caspian.
The growing nonprofit, which has received state and national publicity and acclaim for its innovative work in rural community revitalization, took up residence in the then-vacant, longtime Hardwick Gazette building in the spring of 2022 and made it into a “living room on Main Street.” That building was eventually donated to them.
“It was very much not at all suited to any of our needs, but it had the location,” Friedman told VTDigger in March. “In my mind, we took something that wasn’t being used and we tried to get it useful again, both for our purposes and to serve the community’s needs.”
The building slopes wildly toward the Lamoille River and needs, at the very least, its foundation stabilized, exterior painted and roof replaced just to retain insurance. It is also the only building in downtown Hardwick located in the designated floodway, Friedman said, which makes work significantly more complicated and expensive.
When the Civic’s board was facing that “first layer of repairs” this past winter, it started contemplating whether patching up the building was the right move, or if it might cause its mission to drift into the “can of worms” that is preserving an old building, Friedman said.
Then, “literally, within that month,” she said, “the ‘for sale’ sign went up right across the street” at the flower shop.
As Friedman explained, there are not a lot of buildings in town that fit the Civic’s needs. Many have the same structural issues that tend to come with old buildings, and most others are small storefronts that lack space or a commercial kitchen — the key for the Civic’s popular free weekly community suppers. The former flower shop, however, checked the boxes, with more than double the space on the ground floor.
Friedman and the Civic spent this year pursuing all of the options at once, furthering the building purchase, as well as repair assessments, while continuing the public conversation about what the Civic should do. The organization wrote newsletters soliciting feedback, held public meetings and had “countless conversations with all kinds of neighbors and local experts, from appraisers, to river scientists, to the kids who regularly stop by for popsicles,” said the newsletter about the decision.
“Those conversations have been overwhelmingly towards the move; people have been very supportive and very clear that this was the right thing for our organization,” Friedman said.
That support has been financial as well. Around the time the organization closed on its new building, it had raised just over half of the $400,000 goal for its “New Home Fund,” which Friedman said will cover the cost of the building, as well as some minor repairs. Many have also donated items or volunteered their time to paint the place inside and out.
What happens, then, to the building the Civic is moving out of at 42 S. Main St.?
“Most people have felt a ‘it’ll be what it’s supposed to be,’ kind of thing,” Friedman said. “It’s a beautiful historic building and it’s important to the downtown landscape — and also it might be that the landscape around it has changed enough to make it difficult to be worth saving.”
Earlier this month, the Civic put out a call for letters of interest from anyone who wants to “maintain the building as a cultural and community asset to Hardwick” on a temporary or permanent basis.
Friedman said the organization is open to all kinds of projects that could utilize the building. According to rough assessments — shared on the Civic’s website — the three base repairs that need to be completed to maintain insurance coverage would cost around $140,000.
While the Civic is stepping away from doing that repair work itself, it’s also not condemning the space, Friedman said.
“This doesn’t have to be our decision alone,” she said. “We’ve made the decision that we are not going to save it, that that’s not going to be part of our mission. But that doesn’t mean that somebody else can’t.”
The Civic is accepting letters until Dec. 1, which is also around when the organization hopes to start hosting public events in its new building. If a new owner for the oldest building on Main Street is not found, another option could come into play.
In late February, the Civic entered the structure into the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s buyout program, which would cover the costs of demolishing the structure and returning the property to green space and the floodplain. The organization can back out of the program any time and the current timeline gives them about two years to make a decision.
“We’re just trying to get it either into the next set of hands that’s going to care for it, or into its next life,” Friedman said.
For Friedman, the most meaningful part of the move is that the Civic will continue to hold a position in the heart of town instead of being relegated to an out-of-the-way space, she said.
The “place where you can gather and meet people that you wouldn’t otherwise run into” can be kept “front and center and, say, as important as having a grocery store and a bookstore and a coffeeshop and the places to eat and the places that you need to buy the things you need,” she said.
