NORTHAMPTON — The city has closed a portion of the sidewalk on lower Main Street as a safety precaution following the identification of a structurally compromised vault below the property.
As part of preparations for the Picture Main Street project, city staff and the city’s structural engineering consultants have been assessing the condition of vaults located beneath downtown sidewalks. These vaults are privately owned spaces that extend from some building foundations underneath the sidewalk.
During this work, the engineering consultants hired to make the assessments identified that the vault beneath the sidewalk at 56-58 Main St. is structurally compromised. There is no structural ceiling enclosing this vault under the sidewalk. The sidewalk serves as the ceiling and the beam supporting it exhibits significant deterioration, posing an immediate risk of collapse, even under pedestrian use.
“They’re pretty common in cities, particularly old cities and not just in Massachusetts, but all over the country and all over the world,” explained Carolyn Misch, director of Northampton’s Office of Planning and Sustainability, about the vaults. “There are spaces that are various sizes and they’ve been put to various uses from the time these historic buildings were built. Sometimes they’re just little storage cubbies. Sometimes they’re just window wells, so there’s little bricks of glass in the sidewalk that allow light into the basements. And in other cases, they were used for coal storage.”
The building where this vault is located includes Florence Bank, a vacant former restaurant and several upper floor businesses and apartments. This concern pertains only to the sidewalk, not the building.
“The steel framing spanning from the building face to the exterior basement wall in one location is severely corroded,” said VHB, the city’s engineering consultant. “It appears that it is no longer structurally adequate to support load. At this time, we recommend restricting [sidewalk] vehicular and pedestrian traffic within the affected area until temporary shoring can be installed.”
Misch added that MassDOT wanted the city to do more exploration on the condition of various vaults around the city before further finalizing plans for the Main Street work, which led to engineering consultants being hired to assess the locations.
“They’ve had experience in other cities in Massachusetts where either the vaults weren’t evaluated or they weren’t known, so when the contractor goes to pull up the old sidewalk, they’re opening up the sidewalk and instead of earth, you’re looking into a void that’s part of the basement of someone’s building or business. And so, they didn’t want that to be the scenario on Main Street,” Misch explained.
The city has closed a portion of the sidewalk to protect safety while ensuring safe access to businesses and residences remain open. This closure is a temporary measure, and the city will continue to closely monitor the area. The property owner has been notified of the findings which will help the owner determine the best path forward in shoring up the vault.
“We don’t have a timeline [on closure] because we don’t have the formal report from the engineer yet. So, this is a stop gap measure to close the sidewalk and to make sure that since we’ve been notified by a structural engineer, we want to make sure that we’re being responsible to the public about that and so that was the most important thing to us. It allows us some time to sort of understand what the next steps might be.”
