Chalk one up for the city of Gloucester's volunteers — the appointed officers who work for nothing, and private citizens who do work the city needs done.
At the turning point in the long and recently lusterless history of the Paint Factory, genuine caring was converted into clout by a changing chain of people with more passion than authority.
The negotiations that finally yielded the pending sale of the Paint Factory from a Boston developer to the Ocean Alliance — an information-age, marine-industrial organization that creates not-for-profit scientific intellectual property in the form of research — were never linear and always triangular. That's to say the seller, Vahid Nickpour, needed to complete a deal not only with the buyer, but also with the city government on behalf of its residents.
In the end, all three sides had to agree on the old factory's future.
That this complex set of interests managed to nudge the reinvention and sale of the Paint Factory forward until the Ocean Alliance decided to buy it is all the more notable because the third party to the negotiations — the city and its citizens — was always an informal group of volunteers.
Many were city official-volunteers — members of the Historical Commission.
Some were not even that. Key parties to the successful negotiation of the purchase and sale agreement — Richard Rosenfeld and Marcia Hart, for example — held and hold no official position. They were allowed to participate productively — perhaps even essentially — in the tedious strategic, legal and political negotiations that finally bore fruit this week.
Other non-portfolioed parties entered to participate intermittently.
The only admission requirement to what might be called the "Paint Factory Working Group" was tacit recognition of a willingness to work and commitment to the democratic process — which at times was strained to near breaking by the intensely emotional, tactical, policy and philosophical disputes by which the group made decisions and re-energized itself.
Without this outpouring of citizen interest, the fate of the Paint Factory would be different than it seems now — as the future home of the Ocean Alliance, which chose the site to help brand the organization and imbue it with the city's unbroken, 385-year marriage with the sea.
"There is an object lesson in all of this," said Rosenfeld, a retired businessman and American history author. "There is a relationship between the community at large, its agencies and the private interests."
When the relationship is fluid, he noted, decisions can reflect the "value systems of the entire community."
Architect Robert Heineman personifies the volunteer spirit behind the Paint Factory's promised reinvention. Heineman was the matchmaker who brokered the deal, bringing Iain Kerr, CEO of the alliance, together with Nickpour last summer. Yet, at the time, Heineman was no more than a "sort of" city official.
He had been allowed to join the Paint Factory Subcommittee of the Historical Commission and was voted its chairman — yet he was not and has never been a member of the parent commission.
Textbooks don't recognize such a semi-official status, but it didn't bother Heineman or anyone else.
After he introduced Kerr to Nickpour last summer, he said, "I told Iain that I was thrilled as a citizen, but can't speak on behalf of the commission. I encouraged them to keep talking."
That there was a functional Historical Commission at all traces to former Mayor John Bell, who importuned Maggie Rosa, a semi-retired molecular biologist with a gift at organizational creationism, to take an appointment to the commission and bring acuity to a somnolent body in 2002.
Soon thereafter, Rosa's commission was notified that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had deemed the Paint Factory a historical treasure and, as such, would need the commission's OK before the corps could approve Nickpour's plan to convert the Paint Factory into a mansion. The commission quickly noticed this initiative gave the city leverage that put it at the table with seller and buyer.
Hart, Rosenfeld and commissioners argued over how to use its leverage, settling finally on a demand for a "facade easement," a binding document that describes the exterior and requires future owners to maintain it as is.
Without a portfolio of any kind, Rocky Neck resident Hart took it upon herself to do the legal research and make the connections with the state Historical Commission that provided the boiler plate for the unusual contract-like agreement.
She always took the hardest line, at times drawing ire from Rosa, a pragmatic preservationist who tied the survival of the factory to its getting a modern job to do.
"I want something very clear, very defined, very enforceable," said Hart in March 2006.
Rosenfeld, too, played a pivotal role, providing deep strategic analysis to the never-before-contemplated either/or scenarios while creating ways for the commission to maintain its oversight into the foreseeable future.
Attorney Robert Wolfe, who was a member of the commission before becoming chairman of the subcommittee, has a specialization in historic preservation, and worked countless nonbillable hours wrangling over the wording of the facade easement with Nickpour's legal team from the top-tier Boston firm, Nutter McClennen & Fish.
"It was a true team effort," said Rosa. No member of the team was paid a penny from the city for their work. And no one worked harder than Hart.
As part of a research effort that resembled an archeological dig, Hart sparked a 2004-05 search through City Hall's basement archives (while the building was closed for a year for structural repairs) by city archivist Jane Walsh. That search uncovered the authoritative adaptive reuse study and numerous other documents that became part of the basis for the city's negotiations with the owner.
About the same time, she protested the Army Corps' observation to the city that it seemed not to care about the Paint Factory, a misconstruing traceable to the feeble nature of the Historical Commission before Bell put Rosa in charge.
So convincing was Hart that the Army Corps named her its sole citizen advisor to the Paint Factory problem.
"I'm at the end of a long chain of people who put their heart and soul into saving this building," she said.
Richard Gaines can be reached at rgaines@gloucestertimes.com
