In fall 2021, Town Meeting approved $23.7 million to rebuild the Emery Grover school administration building. On Saturday — after a year and a half of work — the town will rededicate the building.
Emery Grover, constructed in 1898 as Needham’s first high school, had been passed over numerous times on the renovation priority list. Town Meeting’s 2021 approval came despite the Finance Committee’s request that less expensive alternatives be explored.
“The top floor had been condemned for over 80 years. The stairs, floor and doors were uneven and broken,” said Superintendent Dan Gutekanst. “Windows were not insulated and often didn’t stay in the sills. There was no energy efficiency and there was a dilapidated boiler system.”
Amy Goldman, director of Needham Community Education’s adult program, has worked at Emery Grover since 2007. She said this is the first time she has been in a space with real heating that is also accessible by elevator. “I never had an office space that wasn’t dusty, moldy, leaking,” she said.
Gutekanst said he appreciated the community coming together to restore this important historic building. “After decades of small repairs, it became clear that the building had to be either renovated or abandoned,” he said.
Emery Grover is Needham’s first all-electric building. A variable refrigerant flow system provides heating and cooling. “There are air source heat pumps in the third floor,” said Hank Haff, Needham’s director of design and construction. “Under the new dormer, we have two energy recovery ventilation units that provide fresh air.”
“It’s a 120-year-old green building,” said Gutekanst.
The Public Services Administration Building, the Memorial Park Field House and the Rosemary Recreation Complex all use similar heat pump technology, but those rely on natural gas for heating water. At Emery Grover, “even the hot water is provided with an air source heat pump,” said Haff.
The state-of-the-art technology extends to the back parking lot, which is equipped with EV charging stations that will power new electric school vans. Haff said if the building meets its energy efficiency goals over the next year, the town will be eligible for Eversource rebates.
The renovated building is organized by level. The first level is devoted to student learning, including offices for special education and curriculum personnel. “The second level is what we refer to as a community engagement center,” said Gutekanst. It houses personnel, transportation and payroll, all places the public or staff might visit. Gutekanst’s office is on the third floor, along with the business offices and IT.
The top floor, condemned and unoccupied since 1944, is now a conference center. “The floors on the top floor are held up by oak trusses which are pretty spectacular,” said Gutekanst.
“On Oct. 22 we held an HR meeting on the fourth floor. It wasn’t really that exciting a meeting, but I considered it a historic event,” he said. “It was the first time the space was used in 80 years.”
Patiently waiting for Emery Grover to be ready to use is not unique to current personnel. George K. Clarke, author of the 746-page “History of Needham MA 1711-1911,” described similar foot-dragging by his contemporaries to fund the original building project.
“The high school was in the attic of the grammar school, and then it was above the general store,” said Gloria Greis, director of the Needham History Center & Museum. “The town found out that state law required towns to have a high school. When we finally got around to building one, we were in default by about 25 years.”
Greis said the town’s original reluctance to build was overcome by the optimistic civic spirit that accompanied the arrival of the 20th century. “Needham had been in a pretty dark place after losing 50% of its land and 60% of its tax base with the departure of Wellesley,” she said.
The result was a modern high school in the Italianate Victorian style. “It’s very different than anything else in Needham,” Greis said. “There were no significant public buildings in Needham before this one. This was before the library and before Town Hall.”
Unfortunately the building was obsolete within a few years. The original construction included three large classrooms, one for each grade, with a science lab on the top floor. Then the new high school atop the neighboring hill broke ground in 1930.
Clarke reported that the final cost to construct Emery Grover was about $33,000, but his account omits the saga of the town’s involvement with renowned architect Charles Bingham, who designed ambitious Gothic buildings in the Back Bay and at Yale University. The town fired Bingham mid-project for unspecified reasons, and the second architectural firm copied many of his design elements. Bingham sued the town and won.
“The town had to pay him 60% of his contract,” Greis said.
Greis said the 21st century architects did what they could to preserve the exterior of the building. “I really thought they should have kept the open archway,” she said, “but they couldn’t keep the door because it wasn’t handicapped accessible, but they did preserve it inside.”
School administrators moved into the newly reopened building in early October. The rededication ceremony will take place Saturday, Nov. 23, at 10 a.m. Tours of the building will be offered.
Emery Grover: Who was this man with the Sesame Street name and why did he get such a prominent building named for him?
By Brian M.B. Keaney
Born in Newton in 1842, Emery Grover moved to Lawrence as a child and attended Phillips Andover. He read law under the erstwhile U.S. Rep. William E. Parmenter, but suspended his studies when slaveholding states began seceding from the union.
After his discharge from the military, he finished law school and began practicing in 1864. He was appointed a trial judge just four years later at the age of 26, and in 1898, he became trial justice of the Court of Northern Norfolk County, a post he held until his death.
A Life of Service in a Growing Town
Grover married a Needham girl, Lydia Orr, on Jan. 1, 1868, in the small Congregationalist chapel in Needham Center that gave the street its name.
The young couple settled on Maple Street and Grover quickly became active in town affairs. When he wasn’t high up on the bench or at his Nantucket summer house, Grover served as town counsel, lobbied for better train service and even investigated house fires for the town. He also served on the Building Committee, the 200th Anniversary Committee, the Committee of Public Safety, a committee to publish a history of the town, and several others.
With his fingers in so many pies, it should not be a surprise that his name appears all over town records from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Perhaps the most notable, however, was in 1894, when he asked for more money as chairman of the School Committee, suggested the request be granted as chairman of the Appropriations Committee, then oversaw the vote granting the full amount as moderator of Town Meeting. Checks and balances apparently did not come to Needham’s municipal government until some time later.
Things were not always so easy for Grover. In 1893 he presided over what the Boston Globe called the “Hottest Meeting Ever Held In Needham.” Personal insults seemed to be flying all night, and there were complaints that the fire chief was being paid too much money. Things really got contentious when someone insulted the horses of another man. When the equine owner proposed the two of them take the matter of stallion superiority outside, Moderator Grover finally stepped in and threatened to start having people removed from the hall if they did not limit their remarks to the question at hand.
A Man About Town
Grover’s influence extended into nearly every corner of Needham’s civic and social life. In total, Grover spent 23 years on the School Committee and served as moderator 38 times. Clearly, the people of Needham saw something special in him — or perhaps they just saw him a lot as he seemed to be everywhere.
He was an active member of the Norfolk Masonic Lodge, the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company, and the Norfolk Club. With his active social life, you might have expected him to be the life of the party. But Grover was as sober as a judge. Among all the other membership cards in his wallet, he also carried one for the Sons of Temperance.
Battles in Public and Politics
Although Grover seemed to have a great many friends and admirers in Needham, the admiration was not universal.
His biggest political battle came in 1894, when more than 200 Needhamites petitioned the Governor’s Council to deny his reappointment as a judge. When the vote came, Grover prevailed. Fortunately, so too did cooler heads when a bout of fisticuffs nearly erupted in the hallway outside the governor’s office as a result.
Balancing the Books
When not hearing murder trials, helping to found Glover Hospital, or leading social and governmental meetings, Grover was a businessman and inventor. With his father-in-law, he was an officer of the short-lived Needham Savings Bank. When the bank failed, he became its receiver. Although this seems like a pretty big conflict of interest today, to Grover’s credit every depositor got all of their money back.
And in his spare time he secured a federal patent for a computing scale that was designed to weigh items such as produce or dry goods and provide both the weight and the price at the same time. This not only sped up the process, but it prevented calculation errors as well.
Grover’s Enduring Legacy
As a School Committee member, Grover helped lay the foundation for Needham’s education system, including hiring the town’s first superintendent. Today, more than a century later, Dan Gutekanst carries on that legacy from the EG, as those who work in the building now call it.
The completion of the EG’s renovations is a good reminder that the work of one generation shapes the success of the next. Today’s students may not know who Grover was, but his dedication to Needham’s schools paved the way for them all. May we all be so fortunate to leave a legacy as enduring a century and a half from now.
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