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Mon August 25, 2003 - National Edition
SPRINGFIELD (AP) The oldest house in the City of Homes is getting a new address — again.
The Alexander House, designed in 1803 by New England architect Asher Benjamin and built seven years later, is being lifted from its foundation and moved approximately 1,000 ft. to make room for a new federal courthouse. It’s the second time in its history that the building has been moved.
In its heyday, the Greek Revival-style building on State Street was home to a real estate developer, an artist and a Springfield mayor. But in recent years it had fallen on darker times, giving non-sanctioned shelter to drug addicts, homeless people and vandals.
“It has that kind of sorry look of abandonment,” said Frances Gagnon, chair of the Springfield Historical Commission. “We are very hopeful that with the new courthouse coming in, the house will finally be able to be put to good use.”
The building, with its four Ionic columns framing the facade, has overlooked State Street for nearly two centuries. It will be moved across an empty lot to its new home on Elliot Street, facing the parking lot of St. Michael’s Cathedral.
Empty for about a decade, the white two-story house with black shutters, a vaulted ceiling and spiral staircase could easily become a law office or some other professional space, preservationists say.
The house was first home to James Byers Jr., Springfield’s first postmaster and one of the early real estate barons in the town later dubbed the “City of Homes” during a population boom in the late 19th Century.
Byers sold the house to portrait artist Chester Harding before it landed in the Alexander family.
In 1874, former Mayor Henry Alexander Jr. had his 357-ton, 5,700-sq.-ft. house moved approximately 200 ft. along State Street.
“I don’t think we’re really sure why it was moved then,” said Shantia Anderheggen, director of stewardship of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (SPNEA), which bought the house from the last Alexander heir in 1939 and has owned it ever since.
Under the organization’s ownership, the house — which is on the National Register of Historic Places — played a brief stint as a museum and has been the address for the city’s chamber of commerce, the local chapter of the American Red Cross and offices for the Springfield Symphony.
Gagnon remembers volunteering in the offices of a tuberculosis association that was housed there when she was a high school student in the 1950s.
“I was completely awed by the building,” she said. “The entrance is all parlor space. It has gorgeous fireplaces and an absolutely glorious staircase. It’s unlike any other house in Springfield.”
In the late 1980s, homeless people and drug users often broke into the building, Gagnon said.
“A lot of vagrants were getting in there,” she said. “There was a lot of concern about it.”
During the 1990s, the SPNEA tried to sell the house but found no takers willing to take a chance on an urban property.
“The area just was not attractive to lessees or owners,” Anderheggen said. “We tried for 10 years to find someone to take the building over and protect it, but we weren’t successful.”
The SPNEA took the house off the market a few years ago when the federal government said it wanted the lot to build a new $66-million courthouse, which is expected to be constructed by 2006.
The U.S. General Services Administration, which is now soliciting construction bids for the new courthouse, is paying $400,000 to have the house moved, according to Paula Santangelo, a GSA spokeswoman.
“We’re excited about the courthouse revitalizing the area,” Anderheggen said. “We have no doubt that this is good for the building, and I’m sure there will be takers on it when it’s back on the market.”