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Town of Orange Perspective
Orange’s downtown area includes a National Register Historic District composed of
commercial, industrial and institutional buildings in the mid-nineteenth century Gothic
Revival and Late Victorian styles that are evidence of the town’s rapid growth from
the late 1830s to the mid-1930s, during the height of the Industrial Revolution. The
area includes the Commercial Area Redevelopment District (CARD), which contains
several established businesses, and a number of new businesses that have recently moved
into previously vacant storefronts.
The downtown area also includes several properties that have been the focus of
intensive rehabilitation efforts, including the newly constructed Riverfront Park and the
Putnam Hall Redevelopment Project, and the Orange Innovation Center is not in downtown
proper but nearby. The Park will ultimately include a kayak and canoe rental facility leased to a
private business operation and it is anticipated that it will serve as a draw to visitors and
residents interested in ecotourism, bringing with them money to spend in local
restaurants and stores.A Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program,
has as its ultimate goal of eliminating slums and blighted buildings in the downtown.
The proposed Preliminary Design guidelines for a planned Sign and Façade Program are
consistent with the goal of the Master Plan “to encourage and support economic development
which is balanced with the preservation of natural, historic, and cultural resources in order to maintain and
enhance Orange’s economic, environmental, and cultural integrity.” Progress toward a
sign and façade program would also complement plans already underway for the
town’s upcoming Bicentennial Celebration in 2010.
Building on earlier successful efforts to develop a broad consensus on revitalization
efforts, such as the Visioning Session that was held in 2003, we welcome charettes to
identify the broad outlines of a planning strategy facilitated and inclusive of many
elements of the public and private sectors in Orange.
Woodlands
The Town of Orange has tens of thousands of acres of privately and publicly owned
forested lands surrounding the Quabbin reservoir which are harvested but have yet to
achieve anywhere near their full value. In the past few decades the region has struggled
to capitalize on these and other resources to counter the economic burden of lost high-end
machine and tool related manufacturing jobs.
In the forests of North Quabbin, the nine-town region surrounding the northern half of
the State’s Quabbin Reservoir (all of which have bucolic bountiful open space and
share in common a agro-and industrial past and all of whom are looking for a new
direction) timber growth far exceeds removals and unprocessed timber often heads to
external markets providing little value for the local economy. A lack of markets for low
value timber has also hurt the region’s ability to drive economic development.
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