Issues → March/April 2008 → Features →

Life and Death of the Skinner Coffee House

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(page 2 of 4)

Originally intended as just a place where factory girls could get an affordable meal, the Coffee House quickly ballooned into an engine for social change, a true community center. It served as a base of operations for any project that addressed the area's problems. Volunteers pre-pared hot meals for seniors, offered English language classes to immigrants, and made rooms available to battered women in need of refuge. They held dances to keep children off the streets. The building became a second home to many, and it opened its doors to everyone, regardless of class, ethnicity, or color. Residents regularly whiled away days or evenings at the Coffee House attending sewing classes or card games. There was even a smoking lounge in the basement for elderly gentlemen.

Although the Skinners abandoned the building in the 1940s, the city government continued to operate it as a community center into the 1990s. By that time, most of the textile and paper mills had long since ground to a halt, and the immigrants spilling into the area were coming from Puerto Rico instead of Europe. The Skinner Coffee House welcomed them as it had every other wave of newcomers, and Spanish became just the latest in a long line of languages that echoed down its hallways.

In 1994, although the building's mission still drew support and volunteers, the Coffee House was closed. A bad roof and structural insecurities had rendered it unsafe. It was simply used up. It had led a noble life, but unless it received a significant overhaul, its journey was over.

It was this legacy of community spirit and social activism that first drew Joseph Krupczynski's attention to the Skinner Coffee House. "Architecturally, it was not an outstanding building," he admits. "There were certainly more beautiful buildings in Holyoke." It was what the building stood for that mattered. The Skinner Coffee House was the Ellis Island of Holyoke. In a community marked by its diversity, it was the one building that could tell everyone's story.

Krupczynski had a history of social work in South Holyoke and the Flats. He was in charge of a federal grant that funded community projects that doubled as real-world classrooms for his students. Mostly he worked on urban renewal. He believed that the area could utilize its historical resources and its Puerto Rican identity to spark a renaissance of cultural tourism that would preserve these neighborhoods' identities and raise the standard of living of their residents. He could cite any number of examples where similar plans had worked. But each building lost took him further away from his goal.

Krupczynski walked into the Coffee House's hearing before the Holyoke Historical Commission in July 2005 without any idea of what he would say or do. He walked out with a temporary reprieve. He had four months to save a building that had stood 120 years. He was hopeful, but not optimistic. "There was a small chance that we could frame this in a certain way," he remembers, "and then some angels could come in and drop us two million dollars." At the beginning of September, Krupczynski found himself in a UMass classroom with five grad students. After a brief round of introductions, they set out to find their miracle.

The mayor listened intently as Krupczynski's team retold the story of his city on that December night. They said little that he didn't already know. A hometown boy, he'd lived through much of the history they talked about. To him, each patch of grass in the Flats was a building he could remember, not just an abstract tragedy.