The two-story brick building at 3 Merrimack Street in Penacook carries remnants of its past lives: holding cells in the basement, worn shelving and desks from its decades as the Penacook branch of the Concord Public Library.
While the Police Station engraving still sits atop the front door’s stone arch, the 1900 building has spent the majority of its life as a library. A Penacook branch opened there in 1947, according to director Todd Fabian.
Ray Bellia is hoping to bring the building into another new chapter, as a duplex apartment in the heart of Penacook Village. He’s under a tentative agreement to buy the building from the city, and he is expected to close on the property in August.
Bellia said he was charmed by the building’s brickwork and built-in history.
“If it all comes together, it’s going to be two nice homes for two families,” he said.
The Windham-based developer started out working with commercial properties. As the owner of a company that made personal protective equipment for law enforcement and, later during the pandemic, for emergency responders, he started buying space for his business and renting out adjoining units to others.
Bellia moved into residential development around 2016, he said, buying fixer-uppers on the side. That project went on hold during the pandemic, and he returned to real estate in 2022, this time redirecting his focus to apartments and rentals, mostly a few-unit buildings or condos, including one in Concord.
Over the last few years, his company, RL Bellia Properties, retrofitted a former Masonic Temple in Goffstown into a 12-unit building.
“That, to me, was more gratifying, was way cooler than just buying a multi-family and fixing it up and renting it,” Bellia said. “We got to turn something into housing that previously wasn’t, and we got to try to keep some of its charm but also make it nice inside and modern.”
The experience in Goffstown got him to look at other “unique” buildings, which landed him in Penacook. He liked what he’d seen so far of the Concord, with the few small projects he’d taken on in the capital city. He liked Main Street’s buzz.
He also sees opportunity in Penacook Village. Other buildings for sale in the neighborhood have also caught his eye.
“The cool, little downtown area I think has a ton of potential,” he said. “If I can find more properties in the area, I’m looking all the time.”
After years of debate about the branch’s future, the Penacook Library moved at the end of 2024 from the old police station to the new Penacook Community Center built by the Boys and Girls Club.
Beset with accessibility and hazardous materials issues, the old station would have needed more involved renovations than the city was ready to take on. So, city leaders put it on the market.
While historic, the old building lacked parking, accessibility and room for programming, Fabian said. The large ramp structure out front demonstrated just how hard it was to make the space work for a broad public.
Transplanting the branch, even just a few streets away, brought out positive recollections from locals, he said. He was glad to hear someone was interested in keeping the building’s history alive.
“I don’t want to see buildings sit around, especially historic ones,” he said.
They’ll be some permitting work needed to put housing on the first floor in the building’s zone and add a driveway, but Bellia said he’s not anticipating any friction from the city.
“I think they’re pretty eager to get that building into use and create more inventory of housing,” he said.
The renovation itself will also be quite intensive. Not only does the building need to be reconfigured, but some lead paint and asbestos clean up will come first. Bellia is also hoping to expose some covered brickwork and other historic detailing. Each floor is roughly 1,000 square feet.
“It has good bones,” he said.
The sale price was redacted from city records provided to the Monitor, but the property carries a $330,000 assessed value.
