by Frank Schroth
photo by Frank Schroth
Sadly, the building that housed the Milton Woman’s Club is no more. By tomorrow afternoon this will likely be an empty construction lot. Some houses will go up and some folks will move in and memories will fade. But something had to happen.
The Woman’s Club could not afford to have the building repaired. It had been offered to the town at one point but the town could not afford it either. The club decided to sell the property and invest the proceeds to fund their charitable work.
The developer of the property has done a good job. Meetings took place with neighbors. Concerns were addressed and time marches on. The question to ask is what if anything could have been different and as another piece of Milton history disappears what lessons if any do we take from it?
photo by Frank Schroth
“Day is done…”
Sadly, the Milton Women’s Club suffered from more than a generation of lack of appropriate funding which sent the building into an alarming state of disrepair.
About 7 years ago we at Milton Access Cable looked at the building as a possible site for its new cable studio.It would have been much more space than we would initially need but with the possibility of renting out the space that was not needed it could have been considered except for the poor condition of the building.
According to building consultants who were brought in the electrically wiring was in a dangerous state among many other structural factors. Looked like it had not been updated since the building was built in the 1930’s. In fact, it looked like no renovation or modernization had ever been done on the building. It was sort of a time capsule in the same way Miss Havisham’s home was in Dickens’ Great Expectations.
One thing that concerned me immediately was that the unventilated and unairconditioned attic space was packed corner to corner and beam to beam with old theatrical costumes which appeared to be in storage for several generations. They were fortunate that a fire was not ignited by that unsafe storage.
Perhaps, buildings and institutions just run their course and it becomes time to move on but this situation is proof positive that delayed repairs and renovations have a cost much greater than the total expenditure of constant maintenance, repair and renovation.
A sad lesson learned for a once impressive structure.