Street’s future is now
Changes are not all good for this key gateway to the city
Keene Mayor Dale Pregent made a prediction last week: “Within the next 10 to 12 years, Ward 1 will be almost totally college students.”
That ward includes Marlboro Street, the neighborhood where I grew up and where Pregent still lives.
On the mayor’s 75th birthday Wednesday, the two of us sat down for coffee to talk about that area.
Marlboro Street has always been an odd mash-up of homes, businesses and industry. Forty years ago, when I was growing up in that neighborhood, big companies such as MPB, Kingsbury Corp. and Markem employed hundreds of people.
There was O.K. Fairbanks grocery store, several gas stations and a couple of car dealerships. Families went to Dog ’n’ Suds to grab lunch or an ice cream, and the only strong presence from Keene State College was a college fraternity house close to Main Street. Single-family homes lined each side of the street, interspersed with apartment buildings. It was a busy street and one of the major arteries into the city.
Today Marlboro Street is like looking at an old, broken-down car: The frame is still good, but there are missing parts, rusty parts and the whole thing needs a good cleaning.
Pregent’s prediction is likely not far off the mark. Students at Keene State are now required to spend the first two years living on campus. After that, they are free to rent in Keene, and it makes perfect sense that they want to live close to campus on streets like Marlboro Street.
Pregent has homes on each side of him that house students, in addition to the house across the street. He has had to go over and talk to them about loud parties, drinking and trash. He said he’s been lucky, because although they party, they aren’t regularly unruly.
And he points out that renting housing to college students is a big business. If a landlord owns a small cape, for example, that could house four students; he or she could earn $2,000 a month in rent. If the landlord has a mortgage of $1,500 a month, he or she stands to make $6,000 a year. If landlords own two of those type houses, they could make $12,000 a year. With housing prices the way they are, it’s not difficult to find a three-bedroom home at a reasonable price and turn it into a profitable rental.
Keene Assessor Laura Thibodeau says there are 42 single-family homes on Marlboro Street, the same as 10 years ago. There has been a shift in ownership; in 2001 seven of those single-family homes were owned by people who lived elsewhere; today 12 of those homes are occupied by people other than the owners.
But that’s just the single-family homes. There are 104 properties on the street, many of them apartment buildings. And the street has multiple personalities in terms of zoning: Parts are commercially zoned, parts are in a residential zone, and then there’s Wheelock School, an elementary school on the corner of Adams Street.
The city, of course, bought the former Supervalu building at 350 Marlboro Street, near Optical Avenue. Part of that massive warehouse, renovated inside and out, is now home to the Keene Police Department.
Kendall Lane, a Keene city councilor who is also running for mayor, said the time to act is now on the future of Marlboro Street.
“It’s the perfect area where the city can be proactive to determine what happens down there,” he said.
He’s referring to planning the redevelopment of Marlboro Street so that the interests of the residents, the businesses and the city are all in line.
He doesn’t have specifics as to what that might mean, but he brought up two issues: the plan for an extension for Victoria Street to end at Marlboro Street, and the fact that Marlboro is one of the widest streets in the city.
If Victoria Street were to be reconfigured so that it ended on Marlboro Street, it would only work if the traffic, which would include tractor-trailers, came out into a business or industrial zoned area on Marlboro. If that part of the street were strictly residential, there would be tractor-trailers rumbling through an area filled with homes.
So the vacant or almost vacant businesses — David Ford, for example — would play into that equation. If the buildings were demolished, what might go there instead? It could be housing, a park, a strip mall, a restaurant, a flea market. The city has the opportunity now to develop a plan for what that area, and the rest of the street, looks like.
The width of the street is a double-edged sword: It’s good in terms of development, because there is room to grow, but there is a school there, so it’s perhaps not the best move to pump too much more traffic onto the street.
The society of Marlboro Street has changed, Pregent said. “In a transient neighborhood,” he said, “you don’t know your neighbors.”
Marlboro Street is inhabited in part by students. There isn’t the nudge to mow your lawn from the lawn maniac next door. There isn’t the drive to keep the house painted, the trash out of sight. While he was talking about Marlboro Street, Pregent mentioned the way the street is “used,” rather than “lived on.”
Many of the homes still look nice, and certainly the businesses owners keep their businesses looking professional.
But there is a slightly tarnished look to the street. Like Pregent said, it is a street that is used, rather than a street where people live.
Sherry Hughes is a Sentinel columnist.