For many years, the curved front of the Odd Fellows Building in Manchester faced East Center Street to the north and Main Street to the west. When I reached the c-shaped Odd Fellows during the Thanksgiving Day Road Race, I knew I was getting near the finish line as I turned left onto Main Street. Its location at the top of the hill that looked down on Main Street, along with the nearby Mary Cheney Library, Congregational Church, town hall, fire house, Center Park, Lincoln School and Post Office, contributed to this area being the heart of my hometown.
I had been living in Mystic and then North Stonington since 1972 when the Odd Fellows home was torn down in 1982. I often visited my family, and so I was aware of the plans to demolish it. Still, I was somewhat shocked the first time I saw an empty space where the building had once stood. I wasn’t sure at the time (I’m still not) what the reasons were for tearing it down, but it seemed that more than a few people in town weren’t happy about it no longer being where it had stood for almost 80 years. Over the years, it had been home to a pharmacy, a soda shop, an automobile dealership, a barber shop, a bus terminal, other businesses that came and went as well as apartments on the third floor.
My father told me that the building didn’t go down without a fight. The first time the wrecking ball from a crane swung at it, the ball bounced off the wall without hardly making a dent. The old building had been built to last by being constructed with railroad ties. A job that had originally been expected to be completed in a day took several days before it was completed. I wonder if anyone who had been in favor of destroying it had second thoughts when they saw what a well-made and structurally sound building it still was. It wasn’t exactly what you would call a stately building, certainly not beautiful, but it had been part of what made downtown Manchester such a vital area.
It’s surely a stretch to tie the decline of Manchester’s once vibrant downtown area to the destruction of the Odd Fellows Building. There were many factors that went into changing the social, economic and physical landscape of Manchester and many small towns like it throughout the country beginning around 50 or so years ago. But at the same time, I wonder just how different the future of Manchester might have been if someone or some group had looked at that old building and seen possibilities for giving it new life. What if investors had refurbished and modernized it and made it into a new and improved version of its former self? Would that have encouraged other businesses to stay located on Main Street? Would the Buckland Mall still have been built or would the developers have looked elsewhere? Would Main Street then have retained a bit more of the economic and social functionality it had enjoyed for decades if that one domino hadn’t fallen? Maybe, but probably not. The complexity of the factors that go into bringing about transformational societal change can’t be simplified to the extent that I am imagining now.
Still, what would our society be like if we were more inclined to see greater value in old buildings and looked for ways to put them to new uses rather than tear them down because, thinking obsolescence is inevitable, we decide the time has come for a change whether it leads to an improvement or not? I’m skating on thin ice here. For the past 10 to 15 years, since I’ve been able to afford it, I have bought new cars every three or four years. So who am I to extol the value of old things? And perhaps a society that holds fast to old things would also be more inclined to cling to old ideas about how people view each other because of their race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, and economic place in life.
The area where the Odd Fellows Building once stood is now a little park. It’s well maintained by the town and there are a few benches to sit on. There is a well-designed memorial to Manchester veterans who died in the Vietnam War. It’s an attractive place. But it’s nothing like what used to be there, a place people where went to buy what they needed or wanted, to be together and socialize, to live in and call home. What used to be there yesterday is no more and I wonder if Manchester is the poorer for that loss today.
David James Madden