Stephanie Waterman was in what’s now Tuckerbox restaurant, drinking a glass of wine, the night she saw the strip club across North Main Street go up in flames in 2005.
“It still feels surreal,” she said last month. “I remember thinking, ‘Huh. Well, that’s going to be interesting to see what that does to downtown.’ ”
Waterman doesn’t give that fire all the credit for White River Junction’s changing downtown. But these days, she said, “I think it’s a pretty good way to sum up just how different it is.
“What used to be this dark brick building with all blacked-out windows, is now this big, bright, multistory modern building with (Juel Juice) in the bottom.”
From a strip club to a smoothie bar: a radical transformation indeed.
It’s no big secret that downtown White River Junction has been undergoing a kind of renaissance over the past two decades. Where an empty warehouse once sat, there’s now the hydroponics store, White River Growpro, which Waterman runs with her husband, Kendall Smith. Where streets teemed with activities longtime residents consistently deemed “sketchy,” there’s now a rich palette of art galleries and studios, award-winning theater and quality restaurants.
“I think the changes are obviously very good for the economy,” said Pat Stark, secretary of the Hartford Historical Society, who remembered thinking White River Junction was a “total ghost town” when she moved to Hartford in the 1980s. Just a few decades earlier, it had been a bustling, albeit gritty, nexus of Vermont’s railroad industry — but the rise of highways siphoned away much of the town’s economic lifeblood, sending it into decline.
“So we needed something,” Stark said. “At the same time, these changes aren’t for me. They’re kind of like a gentrification to me. And it’s just not really my cup of tea.”
Stark said that although the downtown’s funky, artsy vibe might have improved tourism downtown, she’s not a big patron herself.
“I’m an old, stodgy New Englander,” she said. “I don’t like change.” She doesn’t like “gourmet yuppie food,” and she isn’t much one for the arts. In fact, she hardly goes downtown anymore — except to go to church.
“The forgotten church,” Stark calls it. “Right next to that Village.”
Indeed, it seems impossible to discuss the transformation of downtown without mentioning The Village at White River Junction, the luxury senior living facility that has risen up on Gates Street. Physically, it sits in between two emblems of White River Junction: To its one side, there’s the Barrette Center for the Arts, home of the regional theater company Northern Stage, regarded as a major component of the town’s artistic vitality. On the Village’s other side stands Stark’s white clapboard church, United Methodist Church, built in 1887.
All three of these buildings tell a part of White River Junction’s story: the church standing in for the town’s historic New England heritage, the Barrette Center for the vibrant artsy energy of the present moment. Meanwhile, the gleaming, largely empty Village could stand for the question marks of the town’s future: What, as is often the case with gentrification, might get sacrificed in the name of progress? And who gets to decide what that progress looks like?
In White River Junction, progress has a few faces. One of them is Mike Davidson, who has recently proposed building a five-story, mixed-use building downtown that would include a large commercial space and 50-some-odd apartments, some of which would be leased by Northern Stage for its visiting actors. There’s also David Briggs, whose family owns the Hotel Coolidge, an old railroad mainstay, and the Gates Briggs building where Waterman watched the strip club burn, and Bill Bittinger, who owns the building that replaced it and also earlier developed mixed-use buildings on Railroad Row, near the courthouse.
Another face of the new White River Junction is Matt Bucy, who started buying and renovating properties downtown in the 1990s. Those have included projects like the Tip Top building — which now holds what Bucy envisioned as “its own little world” of artist studios, making it a hub of White River Junction’s creative activity.
“At the time, (the town) was kind of crashing,” Bucy recalled. “Stores were getting abandoned. People were moving out. My lawyer was like, ‘You’re out of your mind. White River’s dying.’ And I was like, ‘No! What’s wrong with you? It’s so cool!’ ”
An artist himself, Bucy said there was “just something” about White River Junction that he liked. And whatever it was — be it the post-industrial vibe of the old buildings and railway station, the quiet beauty of the mountains and rivers, the small-town community and its characters, or some combination of the three — it appealed to other creative souls, too.
“Matt knew, everyone knows, artists go where the rent is cheap,” said Kim Souza, who runs the Revolution clothing store downtown. “And 15 years ago, in White River Junction, rent was pretty darn cheap.”
Souza said her business, which she almost had to close in 2008 around the economic recession, has strongly benefited from the downtown renaissance.
“There wasn’t even close to the foot traffic there is now,” she said. Now, when theatergoers pop in on their way to a Northern Stage play, or when students take a break from their work at the Center for Cartoon Studies, or when art lovers come out for First Friday celebrations, Souza said she feels grateful for the changes.
“One of the things I really value about this town is that, in contrast to many other areas in the Upper Valley and across the country, we — ah, hang on,” Souza interrupted herself. In a moment that would have fit just as well in another time, in a different White River Junction, a train’s horn blared in the background, drowning out conversation for a few moments.
“We actually know most of the developers,” Souza continued, once the horn had stopped. “Many of them are members of our community. We can access them, and hold them accountable. We can walk down the street and see Matt Bucy and David Briggs. These are just the people in our neighborhood.”
Souza, who also sits on the Hartford Selectboard, said that although she views the changes positively, she would like to see more diversity in town. “Racial and ethnic diversity and age diversity especially,” she said. “Young people are getting more interested, but there aren’t that many compelling reasons for them to stick around.”
Bucy acknowledged that, when he renovated the American Legion building on South Main Street into residential and commercial space, he was expecting a younger crowd to fill the 22 apartments, students in particular. Instead, he was a bit surprised that the tenants were mostly professionals — “probably because of the rent,” Bucy said, since rent had to be higher than he was initially aiming for.
“It’s not as rough-and-tumble here as it used to be,” he said. “But I would actually say that rather than (becoming) gentrified in the true sense, it’s actually returning to its former character to some degree. Like, I would actually say we’re bringing it back to more of the energy of what it used to be here.”
But Parker Beaupré — who, as a 24-year-old writer, would seem to be a good candidate to live in White River Junction — isn’t interested in living somewhere he views as so gentrified. Despite Souza’s confidence that Bucy and other local developers are different than those elsewhere, Beaupré thinks the story will end more or less the same.
“Right now, I wouldn’t live (in White River Junction),” said Beaupré, who grew up across the Connecticut River in Meriden and lives there now. He cited Brooklyn and New Orleans as examples of places where gentrification has had, in his view, a negative impact on existing communities.
“What’s really concerning for me,” he said, “is that all of these affluent liberals are praising the progress of what’s going on. There are benefits, but it’s also still capitalism. There’s still someone losing, by definition.”
This raises the question: If the renaissance isn’t for Stark because the aesthetic is too “yuppie” for her old-school-Yankee tastes, and it isn’t for millennials like Beaupré because it smacks to him of capitalist greed — who is it for?
Bucy chuckled at the question.
“White River Junction is for anyone who likes it,” he said. “It’s never been my intention to attract any particular kind of person, per se. Just whoever it clicks with. It’s more like, build more living space downtown, see who shows up.”
Correspondent EmmaJean Holley can be reached at emmajeanholley@gmail.com. Photographer Joseph Ressler can be reached at jcr6326@rit.edu.