BRATTLEBORO — Forty years ago, a Brattleboro landmark was threatened with extinction.
The five-story Brooks House, built in 1871, was one of the largest hotels in New England and a landmark destination for travelers and local residents alike. It remains the largest commercial structure in Brattleboro, with 175 feet of frontage on Main Street and another 120 feet on High Street.
By the late 1960s, the Brooks House had fallen on hard times, and the building was threatened with demolition.
Norman B. Chase then stepped in and saved one of Main Street's most important landmarks from the wrecking ball.
Today, his son, Jonathan D. Chase, runs Brooks House Reality, the entity that transformed a Victorian-era hotel into a thriving mixed-use development.
“He was years ahead of his time when it came to what people now call 'adaptive reuse,' taking historic buildings and giving them a new life,” Chase said. “He was very aware of the historic nature of this building.”
Norman Chase, CEO of Chase Industries, a real estate and development firm he founded in 1951, eyed the Brooks House property for years before he bought it, his son said.
“We used to come up from Connecticut to Vermont to ski in the early sixties, and back then that meant driving up Route 5,” Jonathan Chase said during an interview in his spacious second floor office at the Brooks House.
“That's we when first saw Brattleboro,” Chase continued. “We'd drive through town and he would point to this building and he would always say, 'Someday I'm going to buy that place.”
Ultimately, the first property Norman Chase bought in Brattleboro was 20 acres of farmland along the Whetstone Brook off Western Avenue. It ultimately became the Brookside Apartments. By the late 1960s, the Chase family had moved to Brattleboro and started to settle in.
That's when the opportunity to buy the Brooks House came up.
Well preserved
When Norman Chase bought the Brooks House in 1970, “there were still businesses on the street level, but the upstairs, where the hotel was, was mothballed for about 10 years,” said Jonathan Chase.
“There were 88 rooms and every room was completely furnished, right down to the linen on the beds,” he said. “It looked like someone went out for the afternoon and never came back.”
Chase said the Brooks House was so well preserved that his father could have reopened it as a hotel.
“But that's not the direction he wanted to head in,” he said. “He knew this block could be turned around. In the end, he got it done and this project became a model for other towns in New England.”
Norman Chase bought the property for $225,000, which included the land price with $25,000 deducted for possible building removal.
But the cost of renovating the building into his vision of a deluxe apartment and office complex came to more than $1 million, a considerable sum in the early 1970s.
“It was so big that no one bank in Brattleboro wanted to be the sole underwriter,” Jonathan Chase said. “So all the banks in town ultimately banded together to loan us the money. It took a couple of years, since not many of them had done a project of this magnitude.”
He said that the community at the time was very supportive of what his father was trying to do - restoration that eventually put the Brook House on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980.
Norman Chase died in 1996 at 72, and Jonathan Chase has been running Brooks House Realty since then.
Future plans
Monthly rents for 59 apartments range from $550 for a studio to $1,000 for an apartment in the cupola of the building.
Some of the 15 storefronts on the first floor now are empty, and what was once the hotel's ballroom is now mostly storage space, but Chase said there are plans in the works for these unused spaces.
The ballroom, which still has the flocked wallpaper and blowups of Vermont scenes by famed local photographer Lewis R. Brown on the walls, could be come live-in loft space for artists, said Chase.
As for the long vacant storefront at 124 Main St., and the mostly vacant Brooks House Annex, Chase envisions a combination studio/gallery space with an indoor/outdoor cafe.
There's nothing concrete about either of the plans yet, said Chase, but there is definite interest.
“This town has a unique calling card. People who come here are surprised at the diversity and sophistication of Brattleboro,” he said.
“With all the attention this town gets for the arts, it would be really interesting to have a place where visitors can watch artists actually make their art and interact with the artists,” Chase added.
“Throw in a nice cafe with outdoor dining when the weather's nice,” he said, “and I think this could create a whole new energy for the downtown.”
Reclaiming parking
Chase also plans to take back some of the parking spaces in the Harmony Lot that he has been renting to the town, and offer them to the Brooks House tenants.
“They're putting 24 apartments in the new Co-op building but they don't come with any parking,” Chase said. “I have to offer something extra, and that's parking spaces for the tenants. It's tough to offer a downtown apartment without parking.”
As for the future of the Brooks House as whole, Chase said he has no children and no family members to take over the property.
“I have had offers, but I'm not ready to sell just yet,” he said. “This has always been more than just an investment for our family. I feel a great responsibility for maintaining this building, for its historic value as well as its functional value.”