Metro Center Voice Posts Reviews of Seven Downtown Courthouse Proposals

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Metro Center Voice has posted and reviewed each of the seven courthouse proposals submitted for sites in Metro Center, downtown Springfield. Every proposal now has its own page at metrocentervoice.com/proposals, with a summary of the site, the team behind it, and a link to the full proposal. The review was limited to Metro Center on purpose: the state had seven downtown options in hand when it selected Liberty Junction, at 125 Liberty Street, across the railroad tracks from downtown.

Each review uses the lens court employees applied in their own assessment of the proposals, set out in a memo to Clerk Laura Gentile, who provided it to Metro Center Voice and vouches for its authenticity. That memo judged the sites on court operations: parking and security, how courts are arranged floor by floor, clerk’s office counter space, how jurors move through the building, and judges’ lobby suites.

Its findings on Liberty Junction were blunt. The design places 34 secured parking spaces under the building, enough for the judges, and puts the 38 reserved staff spaces in the Baystate Health garage, across a four-lane road on the opposite side of the building from the employee entrance, in a garage that is not open around the clock. The memo concludes there is no “secure and discrete” means of access from those spaces, as the state’s request for proposals requires. It also found that every court department is split across at least two floors, and that the District Court clerk’s counter, serving roughly 28,000 filings a year, would get about 15 feet. By contrast, the memo called the Dwight Street proposal, one of the seven in Metro Center, “by far the safest design,” with more than 120 parking spaces under the building and each department on a single floor.

Jeb Balise, a developer behind the 413 Dwight Street proposal, has argued for keeping the courthouse downtown, whoever builds it. “Somebody has to lose, and there can only be one winner,” he told Western Mass News. “We are all very willing to lose to a proposal that’s in the downtown, that’s in Metro Center, that works for the downtown area, which ultimately benefits everybody.”

The seven Metro Center proposals are:

  • 50 State Street, rebuilding at Court Square
  • 55 State Street, across from the current courthouse
  • 120–130 Maple Street
  • 275 Chestnut Street
  • 413 Dwight Street
  • 1515 Main Street, the former Steiger site
  • 1550 Main Street, the former federal courthouse

Metro Center Voice amplifies downtown Springfield businesses and carries their perspective into decisions about the district’s future. The full reviews are available at here.

Hampden Register of Probate joins voices protesting pick for courthouse site

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By Jeanette DeForge | jdeforge@repub.com

SPRINGFIELD — The Register of Probate has joined other officials in the legal community to question the state’s decision to have the new courthouse built by an out-of-town developer in the northeast section of downtown.

Rosemary Saccomani released a statement Friday questioning the state Division of Capital Asset Management and Maintenance’s decision to award a $1.94 billion, 40-year contract to Liberty Junction to build the new Roderick Ireland Courthouse on Liberty Street.

Saccomani, who has held the position since 2020 but worked in the office for three decades before that, called on state officials to “take another careful look” at all 11 bid proposals before committing to the agreement that is designed to last as long as 60 years.

“That means looking beyond today’s construction schedule or today’s price. It means considering the family driving in from a Hilltown, the senior citizen trying to find accessible parking, the juror arriving before sunrise, the parent carrying documents while holding a child’s hand, the employee who spends every working day in the building, and the future court system that will inherit the decisions we make today,” her statement said.

Her statement came one day after Hampden District Attorney Anthony Gulluni asked for the state to redo the bidding process, saying the Liberty Street proposal was too far from the city’s downtown business district and aired his own concerns about parking.

They join multiple other Springfield officials and courthouse principals including Mayor Domenic J. Sarno, Clerk of Courts Laura Gentile, Registrar of Deeds Cheryl Coakley-Rivera and several city councilors to protest the decision.

Full Article 

 

DA Gulluni calls state’s courthouse decision a ‘miss’ for Springfield

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By

SPRINGFIELD – Calling the new Springfield courthouse pick “a miss,” Hampden District Attorney Anthony Gulliuni is asking the state to redo the bid process, even though that would mean extending the time it will take for staff to move into a healthy building.

Gulluni has remained mum since the state announced on July 2 it selected a proposal from the Liberty Junction team to construct the courthouse at 125 Liberty St. from the 11 submitted. Thursday, the district attorney told The Republican he disagreed with the choice.

During the year-long bidding process, Gulluni said he stayed quiet because he didn’t feel he should be involved in the selection and didn’t want it perceived he was trying to influence the process. He was surprised when the choice was announced, saying it was not a proposal he expected to be a frontrunner.

But now he is joining other Springfield officials and courthouse employees, including Mayor Domenic J. Sarno, Clerk of Courts Laura Gentile, Registrar of Deeds Cheryl Coakley-Rivera and multiple city councilors, to protest the decision.

“This is the wrong choice for Springfield. It doesn’t make a lot of sense,” he said.

The proposed location is a 20-minute walk from his offices on the top four floors of Tower Square, while staff can walk to the existing Roderick Ireland Courthouse at 50 State St. in three. Many lawyers’ offices and other courthouse support services that have built up around the courthouse will now be far from the chosen site and existing restaurants and business in the downtown will suffer, in his view.

“Other than Union Station, this project is on the wrong side of the tracks, literately and figuratively,” he said, adding it is not in an area people think of as the downtown of the city.

 Full Story

Not Whether, But Where: What the Courthouse Study Means for Downtown Businesses

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A new Springfield Regional Justice Center will get built, and it will generate economic activity for Springfield regardless of where it goes. That much is not in dispute.

What a new economic study argues is that location decides something else — where the daily activity of a working courthouse actually lands, and which businesses are close enough to benefit from it.

The assessment was prepared by Kimley-Horn, a national planning and economic development firm. It examines a single question: what happens to the downtown core if the courthouse moves north of the rail corridor?

The daily number. Between 1,200 and 1,500 people will pass through the building every weekday — judges, court staff, attorneys, jurors, litigants and members of the public. At 1,300 a day and $10 to $15 a head, that is $3 million to $5 million a year in coffee, lunch, parking and errands. Modest per person, substantial in aggregate, and repeated across roughly 250 working days a year.

It is an ecosystem, not a building. Kimley-Horn counted about 1,140 business locations in the Metro Center. Legal services is the largest single cluster — roughly 156 locations, nearly 14 percent of everything downtown, concentrated in the office buildings on and around Main Street within a ten-minute walk of the current courthouse. Attorneys locate near courthouses. Restaurants, print shops, parking operations and services locate near attorneys. Each leans on the others.

Downtown is not starting from strength. The study’s market review found apparent retail vacancy approaching 27 percent and office vacancy approaching 29 percent in the Metro Center, both well above regional figures. Of the 21,108 jobs downtown, roughly half sit in professional services and hospitality — the two sectors most exposed to any change in weekday foot traffic.

Proximity is the mechanism. A site north of the tracks would leave much of the core, including the Main Street legal cluster, more than a 15-minute walk away, with pedestrian access funneled through two rail underpasses built for cars rather than people. The point is not that people could not get downtown. It is that the trip stops being incidental — and incidental trips are what downtown retail runs on.

The risk is redistribution, not loss. This is the study’s central finding and it is worth stating precisely. Courthouse spending does not leave Springfield if the courthouse moves. It relocates within the city. The businesses currently capturing it are the ones that would stop.

Precedent is close by. Chicopee moved its District Court out of the Market Square area and has spent decades and considerable public money trying to rebuild that center. In Nevada City, California, a far smaller courthouse move was associated with an estimated 8.4 percent drop in downtown restaurant sales — roughly $1.8 million a year.

And it is a long commitment. A 40-year base lease, with options that could extend occupancy to 60 years. Whatever gets decided will outlast most of the businesses operating downtown today.

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Introducing Metro Center Voice — Our Monthly Newsletter on all Things Metro

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Our inaugural issue arrives with a giveaway from Springfield Wine Exchange. Subscribe within the next month to enter.

Welcome to the conversation

Today marks the first issue of Metro Center Voice — a new publication built to amplify the businesses at the heart of downtown Springfield. Our mission is straightforward: celebrate the shops, restaurants, firms, and employers that make Metro Center work, and make sure their hopes and concerns are heard when downtown’s future is decided. We’re pro–Metro Center, not anti-anything — a durable champion of downtown that also asks the hard questions.

A launch worth toasting

There’s no better way to kick things off than by raising a glass to the businesses we cover. So we’re giving one lucky subscriber a premium bottle of WhistlePig 10-Year “Snout to Tail” Straight Bourbon Whiskey — aged ten years, 88 proof, barrel-toasted, 750ml. It’s a coveted, award-winning pour from one of New England’s most celebrated distilleries, hand-selected for us by our partners at Springfield Wine Exchange in Tower Square.

Spotlight: Springfield Wine Exchange

The bottle comes courtesy of Carlo Bonavita, owner of Springfield Wine Exchange, a boutique wine and spirits shop in Tower Square and a downtown fixture. Carlo built his business on what he calls “old-school service” — hand-selected products, personal recommendations (tell him what you’re having for dinner and he’ll match the wine), regular tastings, curbside pickup, and deliveries to nearby offices.

“Metro Center downtown is why I came here,” he told us in a recent In Their Own Words interview. “It was the only place in Springfield where I felt I could achieve that success.” That’s exactly the spirit Metro Center Voice exists to champion — and exactly why we’re proud to partner with him for our first giveaway.

How to enter

Entering is simple, and free:

  • Visit metrocentervoice.com.
  • Subscribe to the Metro Center Voice newsletter.
  • That’s it — every subscriber is automatically entered.

Entries are open for one month. We’ll draw one winner at random shortly after and notify them by email.

Must be 21 or older to win. Winner is responsible for pickup at Springfield Wine Exchange in Tower Square. No purchase necessary.

About Metro Center Voice

Metro Center Voice is published by Garvey Communication Associates, Inc. (GCAi) — a Metro Center business for 28 years and publisher of the Tower Square Times — and sponsored by GCAi, Jeb Balise, and Dinesh Patel. Welcome to the conversation. We’re glad you’re here.

State Commits $93M to the MassMutual Center

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The Commonwealth is investing $93 million over five years to modernize the MassMutual Center, downtown Springfield’s arena and convention anchor. Governor Maura Healey announced the funding on July 30 for upgraded safety systems, ventilation, a new video board, improved concessions, and better accessibility. General Manager Sean Dolan noted the venue drove a record $65.8 million in regional economic impact last fiscal year — a reminder of how much of downtown’s momentum runs through Metro Center’s front door.

Source: WAMC, July 30, 2026

 

 

Cultural Partnership Marks 10 Years with New Public Art

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The Springfield Cultural Partnership celebrates its 10th anniversary with a free community event on August 5, from 4–8 p.m., at Tower Square Park. The evening unveils “Sounds of Springfield,” a permanent interactive installation of six outdoor musical instruments, alongside live performances and hands-on arts activities — another investment in Metro Center as a downtown gathering place.

Source: BusinessWest, July 27, 2026

New Energy Across the Metro Center Core

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A wave of reinvestment is reshaping downtown. Fashion entrepreneur Justin Hayes has reopened his JUST10 boutique at Tower Square, White Lion Brewing is expanding its live-music programming, and a new entertainment district is taking shape along Worthington Street with restaurants including Mamou, Eat, and District Fusion Table. A $2 million stabilization of the 1819 Old First Church aims to turn a downtown landmark into an events venue.

Source: BusinessWest, July 21, 2026

Jazz & Roots Festival Fills Court Square

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Historic Court Square came alive on July 10–11 for the free Springfield Jazz & Roots Festival, organized by Blues to Green. The lineup spanned New Orleans funk, Afro-Cuban jazz, and global roots music, drawing crowds into the heart of Metro Center. Organizers launched a new Jazz Club membership program to keep admission free and support youth arts engagement.

Source: BusinessWest, July 10, 2026

White Lion Brewing’s Pridelands Brings Live Music and Cold Drinks Downtown

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White Lion Brewing’s outdoor beer garden, the Pridelands at Tower Square, is running a free Wednesday lunchtime series of live music and food from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., in partnership with the Springfield Business Improvement District. The lineup features local performers including Bruce Gregori and Floyd Patterson II, alongside an expanded menu of lobster rolls, tacos, mac and cheese, and seafood soups. As Ray Berry put it, it’s a chance for people to “come outside, socialize, hang out, and be part of the downtown fabric.”

Source: Visit Tower Square, June 5, 2026

 

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