What’s New Is Old in This Mill City With Great Promise

Sitting in the corner office of the elegant gray granite tower that is Holyoke’s City Hall, Mayor Elaine Pluta said that these are indeed exciting times for the Paper City.
By now, the Green High Performance Computing Center — with its collaborative forces from high tech and higher education — has been the stuff of front pages for months. Add to that the Cisco Smart + Connected Communities project, recently reported in these pages, and what you have are two projects that each on their own could herald a major urban revitalization. And certainly, Pluta’s conversation with BusinessWest reflected those impending developments for Holyoke’s future as Silicon City.
However, Pluta was eager to train her eyes on what has happened already in the city’s downtown area, and what is rapidly happening within those brick mill buildings that once brought the city great fortune as a paper and textiles powerhouse.
Just that morning, she said, she was briefed on the new life for an old building on Race Street, now called the Holyoke Professional Arts Center at Mahoney Place, or HPAC (see related story, page 37). The rehabilitation of that property is just one example, noted Pluta, of how talk of exciting developments in Holyoke is certainly not reserved for the future tense.
Of course, nowhere might that be more in evidence than at Open Square, the city’s first major re-use of the mill buildings along the canals. Owner John Aubin told BusinessWest that within the past year, 14 new businesses have relocated to his mixed-use development, with seven since January. And at the new event space there, called Mill 1 at Open Square, bookings are solid for weddings and other get-togethers. Fifteen events are scheduled for the year already, he said, including several weddings.
In addition, Open Square is scheduled to be the host space for a farmer’s market, on Saturdays from June through October, bringing fresh produce and artisanal regional products to the heart of downtown.
And in a lofty space on the second floor above it all, Aaron and Debra Vega have had their hearts, minds, and the bodies of hundreds of fellow devotees actively engaged in making downtown Holyoke a healthy place to bend it like Bikram.
Owners of Vega Yoga & Movement Arts studio in Open Square, the husband-and-wife team started the city’s first yoga studio, and in its third year of operation are winners of the Valley Advocate’s Reader’s Poll for Best in the Valley.
Aaron Vega, one of BusinessWest’s 40 Under Forty winners in 2010, said that his interest in Holyoke’s downtown came from his own family’s history growing up in the city. “My dad was very actively involved in community and politics,” he said, “and when my wife and I moved back here, we knew we wanted to be actively part of the revitalization of downtown.”
For this, the latest chapter of its ‘Doing Business In’ series, BusinessWest finds out how, in many ways, Holyoke’s future, often housed in symbols of its past, is already here.

Mill Power
While the HPAC was just the most recent opening (or reopening) of a business in the city’s Canal Zone, Pluta said there have been many other developments in this section now known as “The Innovation District.”
Next to the Canal Gallery buildings on Dwight Street, for decades a thriving work/live reuse of an old factory that houses artists in all media, is new development at what was the Deerfield Woodworking building. “Two investors have bought the building, put in extensive HVAC renovations, and have a professional real estate person investigating tenants,” Pluta said. It won’t hurt that the computing center is within a stone’s throw of that property.
Also in the final stages of coming together is an extensive project launched by another 40 Under Forty winner, Internet entrepreneur Brendan Ciecko, and his colleague Ben Einstein, one of the principals at the innovative industrial design group called Brainstream Design.
On the corner of Race and Appleton Streets, an 85,000-square-foot building looks to be the potential future home of Maker College, both a for-profit business incubator and an industrial design and manufacturing prototype shop.
A good portion of funding for this project has been secured, and Pluta said that City Hall, and both the Holyoke and Latino Chambers of Commerce, are helping out with Community Development Block Grant funding.
“The inside will look like a conglomeration of machines and computers,” Pluta explained, “so that people with invention ideas can go there and actually put prototypes together with the equipment inside — rather than having to buy the equipment themselves, which more often than not would be prohibitive to a start-up.”
As another sign of private sector faith in Holyoke, Pluta cited Quantum Properties, LLC, a commercial real estate developer with extensive holdings downtown along the Connecticut River on Water Street.
“Glenn Shealey and Bruce Erickson are the partners,” she said. “They bought a series of buildings adjacent to the Veteran’s Memorial Bridge going into South Hadley. In at least five properties, they are refurbishing them or taking them down and redeveloping that area. They have quite a vision for what they’d like to do.”
While Pluta said that the principals aren’t developing for any specific sector, she added that, “they are very innovative and forward thinking, with a lot of contacts outside the area that they are talking to.”

Have a Seat
Close to that unfolding project, in the old American Thread mill building on Canal Street, those same attributes — ‘innovative’ and ‘forward thinking’ — describe the history of another business, currently celebrating its 30th year owned by one family.
Back in 1981, Fran and Rosemary Arnold bought the then-30 year old Springfield-based business known as Conklin Office Supply. “Basically it was similar to a Staples,” explained their daughter, Alyson, one of the marketing directors for the operation, “but a little more personalized.”
But as a result of those larger big-box office-supply retailers, the new owners decided to table that style of operation and try something a bit different.
“So my father decided to switch over into selling more furniture,” she said. “He and my mom rented a tractor trailer truck, drove it to New York City, bought a truckload of furniture, brought that back, sold it all, and we’ve been doing the same thing ever since.”
While that basic model continues to this day, Conklin has strategically fine-tuned its operations. Alyson Arnold is LEED-certified, and she said that green applications are now a major factor in many of the business details.
“When we bring the purchased furniture back here, we often refurbish everything,” she explained. “Some products are taken down to constituent parts, cleaned up and then rebuilt. Other times it’s just freshened up, all depending on what customers want.
“But we offer all different ranges — we call it eco-remanufacturing, eco-refurbishing, because we try to use all green adhesives, paint, green laminates, and fabric,” she continued. Conklin is planning to soon add a line of new products to its range, a means to supplement existing remanufactured lines like Steelcase, Herman Miller, and Knoll. The new furniture will be of good quality, Arnold said, but still with an eye toward environmentally responsible  construction.
Reflecting on the history of her family’s business in the Holyoke Innovation District —ideally a burgeoning market for the firm, Arnold laughed and said that in many ways, Conklin happened to be in the right place at the right time. “But,” she added, “we came to Holyoke because it made sense for our business.” Space was cheap, and the remanufacturing processes were then housed in nearby buildings.
“I call it luck,” she went on, “but my dad seems to have a lot of good luck in his decisions, which means he’s got a good head on his shoulders.”

A Perfect Posture
The Vegas both made it clear that if your idea of yoga is “a 105-pound person who can put their foot behind their head,” as Aaron said, then their studio is the one to clear up that misconception.
Vega Yoga & Movement Arts, he continued, “offers classes for people 3 years old to 103. We’re community-based, and do a lot of outreach with organizations like Girls Inc. and the Care Center. We want to bring the benefits of yoga to the people of Holyoke and beyond.”
Debra said that VYMA is unique among area studios in that it offers classes for children and adults simultaneously, so it can be a very family-oriented activity. “We’re not going to overload with philosophy — this is about feeling good. People with back or neck injuries, weight issues … we are the studio for you.”
The idea for the studio came after both had taught in a number of regional studios. When they set foot in the spaces at Open Square, a complex that still generates much of its own electricity from the original water turbines, they knew almost immediately that this was the place to meet the needs not just for the yoga studio they had envisioned, but for their belief in bringing vitality to downtown Holyoke.
And it didn’t stop there.
“We thought, what more can we do to help Holyoke get back on the right track?” Aaron said. “Debra and I both became very active in C.R.U.S.H. (Citizens for the Revitalization and Urban Success of Holyoke) a grassroots volunteer organization that brings people together to discuss ideas, issues, and creates a social network for Holyoke people and business.”
However, he continued, being an active business owner and community-minded citizen meant that the next logical step was to get involved in politics, and in 2009, he ran for city councilor. “It was the first time I ever ran for any elected office,” he said, “and I won.”
As an elected representative of the city, and as one of the people actively engaged in making progressive changes, Vega agreed that there is a lot of good news about what is happening in Holyoke. “The GHPCC, Cisco, the new senior center, city library, the possibility of passenger rail,” he listed off as examples, “are all such incredibly positive news for the city.
“But when we start talking about revitalization of a city,” he added, “and for the creation of community, it has to come from within. There’s only so much that the government can do. Of course, there’s a lot it can do, but for boots on the ground, it takes private people.
“Holyoke has a community of citizens and businesses that is committed to making this a better place,” he continued. “For a lot of us, the history of the city is a tool for rebuilding — not just as a reminder of what it isn’t any longer.”