Quality of Life Issue

I have a few thoughts about RiverPlace, the “lifestyle center” proposed for Hudson.

There is no doubt that W/S Development of Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, will design and build a fine looking project. There will be stylish buildings with brick facades, nicely landscaped lush green lawns along with attractive shrubs and decorative plantings. We’ll have many fine stores, a hotel with 300 to 400 rooms, a conference center, many restaurants, and a movie theater with up to 16 screens. All of this will be very nice. But it seems to me only wise to measure what we may gain by what we may also lose.

I’ve already indicated some of what we will gain. Add to it that the project will create jobs for many, especially young people just starting out in life. Retail jobs, jobs in restaurants, jobs in the hotel, jobs in the 16 screen movie theater. The project will bring a lot of revenue to the town of Hudson as well. Keep in mind, though, that all of the stores, the restaurants, and the hotel will almost certainly be owned by corporations, and most of the money they earn will not stay here.

Let’s look at something else. We are told that there will be many fine high end stores in this project. But don’t we already have every kind of store we could ever ask for in the greater Nashua area? Is there any retailer that we are all pining away for? If you want Sears, we have it. Macy’s? We got that too. Kohls, Barnes and Noble, Starbucks, Old Navy, L. L. Bean and anything else you could want. How about restaurants? Well, we have TGIFridays, The Ninety Nine, The Olive Garden, The Longhorn, Chilis and on and on. We are also fortunate to have many fine locally owned restaurants in the area. I wonder if they would welcome even more competition from the chains.

The concept behind the design of RiverPlace is to recreate an “historic downtown.” It seems to me we already have one of those. It’s called Main Street, Nashua. The city has gone to great pains to make the downtown area easily accessible. The area has been made much more attractive, there are lots of retailers, and a real effort has been made to make the area visually attractive and inviting. Does Hudson need to have a downtown artificially created, when one already exists just across the Merrimack River?

RiverPlace will be the largest project of its kind in New England, with between 2 million and 2.5 million square feet of retail space. Indeed, it will prove to be one of the largest in the United States. It is inevitable that many smaller malls will spring up all around this massive project. Can anyone really imagine what the traffic will be like? Just for starters, take a drive up Amherst Street and try to remember what it looked like twenty years ago. Then drive down Daniel Webster Highway and try to recall what it was like before the Pheasant Lane Mall was built. Now imagine Lowell Road 10 years from now as a mirror image of the Daniel Webster Highway.

Can’t a better use for the 375 acres of the Green Meadows Golf Course be found? At the very least, wouldn’t it be better for the Nashua/Hudson area if an alternate use could result in jobs that pay more than retail jobs customarily do?

Economic growth is necessary, yes, but the goal must be to manage it in such a way as to maintain a desirable quality of life.

Do we have to pave over all the land on both sides of the Merrimack River all the way from Nashua and Hudson to the Massachusetts border?

Quality of Life Issue

David Phelps - Hudson