PCHC preserving spirit of Helen Hunt building

January 18, 2007

     When representatives of Penobscot Community Health Care and Old Town Family Practice held their ribbon-cutting ceremony at the former Helen Hunt School in Old Town last summer, medical director Christopher Ritter M.D. made a point of referencing the building’s historical significance to many of those gathered for the event.
     “We want to put the Helen Hunt School back in the heart of this community,” he said.
     Since that day, PCHP has been hard at work bringing Ritter’s stated desire to fruition. The century-plus old building is currently in the midst of an extensive renovation process that will eventually allow it to be used as a state-of-the-art medical facility housing a family medical practice, dental services, a physical therapy program, and a community room. The initial work has also been done to create a third-floor wing of efficiency apartments that Carlson says is intended for use by future dental externs who will come from other states as part of their training. For now, though, additional work on the apartments is on hold, at least until the next round of capital campaign fundraising kicks off. But in transforming the former school into a top-level medical facility, PCHC is committed to preserving as much of the building’s history as possible.
     “We want to preserve the historical quality of the building while making it a modern and active community health care practice,” Rev. Bob Carlson, president of PCHP, said. “This is a building that has a lot of meaning for many people in the community.”
     One of the ways in which PCHC is preserving the building’s historical link to the past is incorporating elements of the original structure into the renovation process. Even though the interior of the building has been gutted and walls have been knocked down to create necessary space, the construction crew has left intact much of the wainscoting and even the chalkboards intact with the intention of painting over them later on. Portions of the outside roof will also be preserved and utilized in the new façade of the building. For Gary Dyer, project superintendent for Blane Casey’s Construction, paying homage to the past is the best way to make the shift from the old to the new.
     “Some buildings have souls in them,” he said. “You go inside some buildings and you can just feel the energy of the kind of people who lived there. Coming into this building, you can feel all the students from all the years that it was a school. You can feel their laughter and their tears and their energy.”
      Dyer’s respect for the past has kept him from tearing down a mural in one of the classrooms on the second floor of the school. Fashioned from construction paper, the mural occupies nearly the entire wall of the room and is made up of overlapping cutouts of trees that are arranged around a small town with a railroad track.
     “I’ve torn a lot of things down from the walls in here,” Dyer said, “but I haven’t been able to tear that mural down. You can just see all the work that the kids put into it. I’m going to have to take the time to remove it very carefully and roll it up and give it to (the school department).”
     Another part of the Helen Hunt School will be immortalized in the form of clay tiles that Carlson says will be given to some of the contributors to the capital campaign. A special process will be used to superimpose a photograph of the original school building onto the pieces of slate, creating a unique and two-fold artifact.
     The ongoing renovations at Helen Hunt are scheduled to be completed on Nov. 27, a little under a year from now. That won’t be a tough deadline to meet, Dyer says, because the interior nature of the work will make it possible for the crew to maintain their schedule in all weather conditions.