New Hampshire natives and longtime residents are familiar with the funeral watch over the state’s sagging barns, and most famously, over the Old Man of the Mountain, who fell to his storied death on May 3, 2003.
That was the year the city of Concord purchased the granite tannery building in Penacook, built in 1846. Four years later, despite money spent to stabilize the crumbling structure, a portion of the tannery’s roof collapsed under the weight of snow, and the building was ultimately demolished. Now, mourners of Concord’s lost past turn their eyes to the city’s iconic gas house, the round brick building on South Main and Water streets that powered much of the downtown between the presidencies of Grover Cleveland and Dwight Eisenhower. Will it, too, collapse into time and fade from memory like Concord’s enormous train station? We fear it will.
Only the top of the gasholder itself, a 40-ton iron tank open at the bottom, is visible and that only from inside the round brick building that protects the gasholder and the gears and rails that allowed it to rise as it filled with coal gas and fall as the gas was consumed.
People are fond of the building. It’s a head-scratcher for tourists, a monument to the industrial age and architecturally quite lovely. It’s also unsafe to enter. The building’s fanned rafters have been damaged by weather and a fallen tree. Its octagonal cupola has tilted, and the whole structure is in danger of collapse. How soon? Consultants can’t say.
They have estimated what it would cost to save the building, the only one of its kind in the nation with all of its equipment in place: $2.1 million. We don’t know if that price includes coping with whatever pollutants remain on the site or beneath the tank in a 24-foot-deep cistern that once held 80,000 gallons of water.
Making gas from coal by heating is an environmental horror show. The process yields flammable gas along with coal tar, napthalene, benzene, toluene, xylene and a lot of other things now considered toxic and/or carcinogenic. Earlier in this century, Liberty’s predecessor spent a lot of money removing coal tar pollutants from the Merrimack River and a pond near what is now Exit 13, but contaminants remain.
Liberty Utilities acquired the gasholder and its 2 acre site when it purchased its predecessor, Energy North. The site’s only role in company operations is as a white elephant, or make that an albatross. The company, we believe, would dearly love someone to buy the gas house building and preserve it, but no developer has expressed interest. Tearing down the building would cost $350,000, a burden rightly borne by Liberty’s shareholders, not its customers. The city could purchase the property, but is that the best use of several millions of public dollars? Probably not. Could the building, if saved, be re-purposed as a theater literally in the round, a bar or restaurant? Not without a massive investment in construction and environmental remediation. Could the gas house lot become a park, as some manufactured gas plant sites, notably Seattle’s Gas Works Park, have? Sure, all it takes is money, from taxpayers or someone who wants naming rights to a significant piece of New Hampshire history.
There may not be much time left for that someone to step forward.