To the Editor:
How to find resolution when one group wants a variance to enable immediate construction of a 58-foot high building and others want fairness with a process that any applicant would have to endure. Application, appeal, controversy – it revolves around a Newcastle ordinance that restricts height of new construction to no more than 40-feet.
No variance, no exception seems reasonable to consider when an architect puts pencil to paper and designs a 58-foot building that is not a church, not a lighthouse, nor an observatory, but a residence for 70 or more people, including 54 boarding students, dorm parents and their families and director of the residential program who would occupy the penthouse space overlooking the Damariscotta River.
While a lot of people in the community understood the “private high school serving the public” is taking a new direction with a residential program that would bring hundreds of thousands of much needed dollars to the 200 plus year-old town academy, few of us conceived a hotel that would crown the cliff and shadow the track field. It is mammoth.
Such is the case with a proposed dormitory that will go before the Newcastle Board of Appeals, Monday Sept. 23, with a request for a variance.
It seems unbelievable that a building permit would be applied for when the building proposed is almost a third taller in height than what Newcastle voters had approved.
Indeed, special consideration ought to be given – but it should first be given to the people who live here, pay taxes and will have to live alongside whatever Lincoln Academy becomes. I am interested in what happens in my neighborhood, as are my neighbors. We are people whose children have babysat others; who share ladders and bonfires, who wave and carpool and walk up and down the hill together. Yet I want to be supportive of what Lincoln Academy does – it is part of the neighborhood, too.
Beyond what will happen to the school, its quality of instruction, its own identity and whether or not this is a good change, I wonder about what this new campus will look like? Some might agree the proposed dorm looks like a penitentiary. I would think the trustees would like the dorm to be welcomed by the neighborhood and do whatever it takes to ensure a similar welcome for the students who will come to live here as well.
Beyond its ugliness, the proposed dorm does not fit in with the houses that are typical of old Newcastle, like the four capes that climb the hill as I approach my driveway or the graceful residence across from Poe Theater that recently became another dorm, Hillcrest House. The new dorm should look like houses in the Academy Hill neighborhood and not a single one is over 40 feet high.
Please don’t do anything to spoil the field. It is hard to picture more lighting, and sidewalks that will crisscross the track field. Since making my home here in 1995 (I am a newcomer, too), I have enjoyed seeing life unfold on this open field: snow sculptures at Winter Carnival, girls’ soccer practice, boys and girls on the track team making laps, a parent teaching a little someone to ride a bike, and hundreds of cars on Graduation Day. It is a field we have enjoyed every Fourth of July, as it gives a great vantage of the harbor and the fireworks display.
Recently I watched some of the new international students practice kicking a ball through the goal posts and a girl reading in a chair. All those things are ways the Lincoln Academy community and the neighborhood have shared and enjoyed this field. Why block off a big part of the horizon?
The water tower at the top of my driveway is 40 feet tall. I wonder if it will no longer be the highest point in town if the variance is granted. If the variance is granted, will there be another variance asked for and granted, when a third dorm is built – as the school plans to eventually board 120 students.
What is the point of an ordinance if it can be rescinded “for special consideration?”
Lincoln Academy and its architect need to go back to the drawing board. As an abutter, I know how much land Lincoln has. It can design a residential campus whose buildings match the scale and spirit of this neighborhood. Certainly this would offer more of a home-away-from-home to our boarders without an institutional look, and wouldn’t it be better to offer a discrete building for dining and socializing of all the students, and reserve the present Dining Commons for lunch only?
This is outside the realm of the appeals process but I offer it as alternative concept that might not have caused an appeal in the first place.
We – the academy, the community and the town – need to knit the new together with the old. We could start by rejecting this proposal. It does not fit our ordinance and it does not fit with the neighborhood.
I hope when it meets Monday night at 6 pm in the Community Room on River Road, the Appeals Board makes this clear.
Martha Frink
Newcastle
