Guest View

By Pete Anderson

Where is Norfolk’s center? The Village Green? The library? Town Hall? Infinity Hall? The fire station? The EMT building? Station Place? Each of these is a center for some of the people, some of the time. But where is our commercial center?

Consider how the cluster of Norfolk’s oldest commercial buildings along Route 44 turns its collective rear end to the uninviting wetlands behind. And how the newer structures on Curtiss Road, strung out one by one along the roadbed of the old Central New England Railway, look out across the same reedy wetlands to focus on . . . the backsides of the older buildings. There’s no commercial cross-fertilization here, no cohesion. To paraphrase the author Gertrude Stein: “There’s no there, here.”

Welcome to the new City Meadow! In bringing accessible boardwalk paths and a small pond to that much-neglected area, the town’s economic goal is to populate the space that now spreads our downtown apart—and in doing so, to bend our outward focus inward. Our overgrown backyard will become our more companionable front porch, turning downtown Norfolk inside out.

By this time next winter, with a little bit of luck, we’ll see skaters pirouetting on that iced-over pond in the Meadow. And then—imagine: with a dash of thoughtful landscaping, we can open up new views and wide pathways tying Station Place together with Town Hall and the farmers market in one direction, and the library and Village Green in the other. Presto! We will have created Norfolk’s own singular, inviting, pedestrian-oriented, park-centered public Place.

And that’s just the beginning . . .