The new senior center is scheduled to be ready in a year, a welcome note for seniors fed up with the windowless current center.
Holyoke Senior Center groundbreaking ceremony with Thomas Senecal, excutive vice president of PeoplesBank, state Sen. Michael R. Knapik, R-Westfield, Shirley Morrison, chairwoman of the Council on Aging, architect John Catlin, Ann Hartstein, state secretary of Elder Affairs, Barbara Bernard, honorary Chairwoman of fundraising, Kathleen Bowler, executive director of the Council on Aging and Mayor Elaine A. Pluta. HOLYOKE – A ceremonial ground-breaking Wednesday previewed the construction that is scheduled to begin in late May on a new, $8.1 million senior center.
“Overnight success after 20 years of work,” said Kathleen A. Bowler, executive director of the Council on Aging.
The senior center, now housed in a basement without windows at the War Memorial at 310 Appleton St., will be built at the former Anne McHugh School property at Beech and Sargeant streets.
Bids from constractors are set to be open Thursday and construction should begin in a matter of weeks, Bowler said.
The ceremony was held under a tent with a background of sloping and gouged dirt and construction equipment ringed by a temporary chainlink fence.
Remarks by Bowler, Republican columnist Barbara Bernard and others referred to the years of pushing and planning for a new senior center. That led to the shovels slicing into dirt where the McHugh School, and before that, Holyoke High School, once stood.
The City Council has approved borrowing to fund most of the project. Fund-raising, such as a $100,000 donation from PeoplesBank, will reduce the amount the city must borrow, Bowler said.
Senior citizens gather at the center to have lunch, play bingo, cards and other games, participate in health and other seminars and meet for bus trips.
The new facility will be 20,000 square feet with part of the building one-story high and the rest two-stories in height, Bowler said.
“This has been a dream of Barbara’s for many, many years and I could not be happier,” Bowler said.
“Thank every single one of you for your part in making this dream come true,” Bernard said.
It was a special day for Carol Rogers, 77, of Holyoke. She might be playing bingo in a year on the same spot from which she graduated from Holyoke High School when it was at Sargeant and Beech streets in 1951.
“High school was so much fun back then,” Rogers said.