Eagle Times Staff
The dust has settled and Claremont’s Rethinking Pleasant Street project is getting positive attention.
The project to shift truck traffic off the downtown street and reimagine it as a more business- and resident-friendly neighborhood recently earned a Merit Award of Excellence from Plan New Hampshire.
The Plan NH Awards honor projects that balance the needs of the people and environment while preserving the “sense of place” that makes New Hampshire’s towns, cities and villages unique.
Claremont Director of Planning and Economic Development Nancy Merrill said she believes the project was honored because it wasn’t just focused on fixing one issue, but setting the downtown area up for future success.
Part of the project was simply environmental, replacing old sewers and waterlines, Merrill said. But, a bigger part of the project was thinking about how the neighborhood would grow and change. Thinking about how trucks use the street and how benches and trees create places for people to sit down.
“I think it was the context as much as anything,” she said, explaining the project sought to fulfill the needs not just of drivers or pedestrians, but also the interaction between commercial and residential interests.
“This was a complicated project that required great levels of collaboration,” said the Plan NH’s jury in describing why they honored the Claremont project.
Merrill said some people might disagree that the public was involved enough, but she points to the project’s final online meeting having 200 participants.
“I think we tried to work closely with the public,” she said.
While it has now won an award, reaction to the Pleasant Street project has “been mixed,” she said.
“It was a big change, and big changes are always controversial,” Merrill said. “We are hearing from some people that it should still be two-way traffic. Hearing from some people that it is great and that it slowed the traffic down. People who like to walk are more comfortable.”
The jury was also “impressed” that Claremont used local funds for the project and said, “it will payback tenfold” as the “reimagined downtown area will spark economic impacts now and into the future.”
Merrill said she believes the jury is right and expects the area to just keep getting better in the coming years. Now that the public investment has been made in Pleasant Street, private investors are following.
“A lot of activity is going on behind the scenes,” she said.
The street is seeing “some new development with new owners of existing buildings. And people actively looking at rental space. … Over the next year, you are going to see some of that new commercial space, as well as a few residential floors fill out. It is a process. It doesn’t happen overnight,” she said.
“We felt very early on we couldn’t ask the private sector to invest in all those buildings if we weren’t willing to invest in the infrastructure. It was a necessary thing to do,” she said.
She pointed out, for example, that the old waterlines didn’t support sprinklers on the upper levels of buildings, which are required to redevelop the buildings.
“We were really pleased to receive the award,” Merrill said. “It is not typical to get a statewide award. We spent a long time on this. And we spent a lot of time with the residents of the community on this.”
“We had a large non-profit, the New Hampshire Preservation Alliance visit a few months ago and we were proud to tour it,” she said.
Other projects honored this year include the riverwalk in Berlin; Harmony Place, a mixed-use, affordable housing project in Durham; Makers Mill, a community marketplace and vocation hub in a former small engine sales and repair shop in Wolfeboro; an expansion and renovations of Pope Memorial Library in North Conway; and Ruth Lewin Griffin Place, an affordable housing project in Portsmouth.
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