Swampscott Boutique Hotel Feasibility Sought For Hadley School Reuse

SWAMPSCOTT, MA — A proposed boutique hotel or a mixed-retail building with reserved community space emerged as the top two priorities for the Swampscott Select Board as members discussed the future of the Hadley School building expected to be available for town reuse as early as the spring of 2024.

Select Board members worked off the Hadley Reuse Committee's report suggestions from 2021 with members consolidating around a commercial space for the redeveloped building now that the town also owns the oceanfront Hawthorne Property that is planned to remain either primarily or entirely open space.

"It's obvious to me that one of these properties has to be revenue-generating," Select Board member David Grishman said during Wednesday night's meeting. "It has to be. Do you want to have a revenue-generating property on the ocean or do you want to have a revenue-generating property at the Hadley?"

The conversation came on the heels of a budget discussion in which Town Administrator Sean Fitzgerald once again said that the town is not going to be able to "cut its way out of" tightening budgets for much longer without sacrificing personnel and programs and that economic development is the ideal gateway to adding town and school programs and services while still keeping property taxes in check.

With that as the backdrop, most of the Board supported examining the possibility of a boutique hotel space, with Katie Phelan holding out for a mixed-retail location that would generate enough revenue to offset reserving part of the building for needed community service or rental space.

"It seems to be a hospitality asset at the Hadley School would be something that would be able to drive considerable room tax, meal tax," Grishman said, "and would bring people down to Humphrey Street area and really support the restaurants in that area, the businesses in that area. I am supportive of trying to drive revenue.

"I think that would be an incredible win for our town."

Board member MaryEllen Fletcher noted that she supports generating revenue from both the Hadley and the Hawthorne properties — at least to some degree — to help offset future budget pressures, while Phelan said her ideal would be a "community services hub" at the location.

Select Board member Peter Spellios suggested empowering Fitzgerald to commission a consultant to perform a feasibility and marketing study to determine whether the site — and to an extent, the town of Swampscott — would be a viable location for the Board's vision.

He noted that if the Board was looking solely at the revenue then market-value condominiums would be the more surefire hit, but allowed that the Reuse Committee was specifically charged with not considering market-value housing as a possibility. The Reuse Committee whittled the ideas in front of it to the boutique hotel, the mixed-use retail and community space, and senior affordable housing as the three primary suggestions in 2021.

The Hadley School Reuse Committee in March 2021 said nearly 800 residents responded to a survey where a "clear majority" said they agreed or strongly agreed that the site should include a public purpose and that a "strong priority" was maintaining, adding or improving open space amenities on site.

That survey and the Committee's work, however, did come one year before the town purchased the Hawthorne property.

The conversation also came on the same night the Select Board announced it has reached an agreement in principle to purchase the property at 12-24 Pine Street in order to develop between 30 and 40 affordable housing units targeted specifically for veterans.

The Board voted to empower Fitzgerald to commission the feasibility and marketing study and report back on its results in about six to eight weeks.

"There is a sense of urgency to move along in this process," Select Board Chair Neal Duffy said.

Duffy added that another public meeting will be scheduled in April on proposals for the Hawthorne property that would take some of the proposals from the January "idea exchange" at the property and turn them into a "focused discussion" on "the specifics of these scenarios and the realities of pursuing them."

(Scott Souza is a Patch field editor covering Beverly, Danvers, Marblehead, Peabody, Salem and Swampscott. He can be reached at Scott.Souza@Patch.com. Twitter: @Scott_Souza.)