Metro Center Voice Posts Reviews of Seven Downtown Courthouse Proposals
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.
