June 22, 2006

By Diane Chiddister

Affordable housing for artists, with studios on site. An incubator for new businesses. Offices for local nonprofit groups. A center for media arts.

These were a few of the suggestions made last Saturday morning as possible future uses for the Fels-Sontag building on the Antioch University campus. The building, currently the site of Antioch University McGregor, will be almost vacant by 2008 when McGregor moves to the Center for Business and Education.

The suggestions were offered during a brainstorming session by a group of invited villagers and Antioch College representatives, who came together at a gathering sponsored by the college last Saturday morning. The gathering was the first of a series of joint college/community discussions on possible uses of buildings and land on Livermore Street, according to Antioch College Executive Vice President Rick Jurasek, who moderated the event. Participants were asked to imagine potential uses of several Livermore Street buildings, along with the land on which they stand, which would benefit both the college and the community. About 25 people attended the morning event.

“This is a vital opportunity for the village and the college to speak to each other about what we share,” Antioch College President Steve Lawry said in his opening remarks.

In his introduction, Lawry emphasized the importance of town/gown cooperation.

“The village and the college are of the same fabric,” he said. “It’s a vital relationship and we fail to recognize that at great cost.”

A vibrant Yellow Springs is a critical element in attracting students to the college, according to Lawry, who said the village’s “welcoming, progressive values are a great asset to us.”

However, he said, in recent years, “some of the fabric has frayed,” between the college and the community. One source of tension is that many new Antioch College faculty cannot afford to live in town, which makes faculty recruitment more difficult, he said, as well as lessening the village’s cultural and intellectual vitality.

For its part, Antioch College has “in some ways turned more inward, away from the community,” Lawry said.

The Livermore Street area — called by the college the Livermore Street Corridor Project and bounded by the college gym on the south and the student union on the north — is of special importance because that street marks the place where the college and the community physically come together, Jurasek said, so that it seems especially appropriate for both the village and the college to consider each other’s needs in planning the area’s future.

Since last fall Antioch College has made a significant effort to transform itself, starting with the new curriculum launched at that time, he said. Along with a new curriculum, the college has embarked on an ambitious plan to renovate existing buildings and in some cases to build new ones. The college last year renovated a dorm along with the science building, to make both better suited for a learning community-based curriculum, Jurasek said.

The college’s next construction project is to build a new student union, at a cost of about $8 million, which will be located at the site of the current parking lot west of the current union. The project is slated to be completed by September 2008. The college will build a new union building rather than renovate the old one because of the deteriorated physical condition of the current building, according to architect Robert Loversidge.

While the college could plan the new student union to meet only its own needs, it makes sense to also consider community needs, according to Jurasek. Possible renovations that could meet both village and college needs include a conference/multi-use center or a performing arts center, he said. The college also plans to renovate the Olive Kettering Library.

“These two projects especially will generate a lot of excitement,” according to Jurasek, who said the two projects combined will cost about $13 million.

After those projects are completed, the college plans to focus on the Livermore Street Corridor, including the current Spalt Hall, a dormitory which may be transformed into needed hotel rooms. The Livermore Street Corridor also includes the Fels-Sontag building, the Kettering building and the 22 acres around the buildings. The buildings could be demolished to make way for new buildings, including affordable housing, Jurasek said.

“We want the college and the village to derive the maximum joint benefit from the 22 acres west of Livermore,” Jurasek said.

Funding for the new construction and renovation is coming from the Antioch College capital campaign, which has raised about $44 million toward a goal of $65 million, Lawry said. While the capital campaign originally focused on building an endowment for the college, the focus changed to more directly address the college’s immediate goals of redesigning curriculum and recruiting new students, he said.

While Saturday’s meeting did not address financial figures regarding the Livermore Street Corridor Project, one of the “assumptions” in material passed out at the meeting was that the college and the Village would jointly fund some of the project if the buildings were intended for both college and community uses.

Saturday’s event was not a planning meeting but “the opening conversation” in an ongoing discussion, Jurasek said. Antioch plans to hold a second seminar with village stakeholders in September, and will also present the possibility of village/college partnerships at the annual Community Forum.

Contact: lheaton@ysnews.com