Posted on July 26, 2018
Boston-based developer E. Denis Walsh had a long-running love affair with Holyoke. It began while he was on his honeymoon. The year was 1978. Walsh and his wife Eugenie were on a tour of New England bed and breakfasts. Along the way, they stopped at Holyoke’s Yankee Pedlar restaurant and drove around the city.
Walsh marveled at the old paper mills, which once produced 80 percent of the nation’s writing paper. He admired the canal system that provided electrical power to keep the mills humming. His neck craned upward at the mansard roofs and decorative stonework on the downtown buildings and churches. He noted that the streets were laid out in grids, a detail that comes with being one of the nation’s first planned industrial cities. “He fell in love with the place,” said his son Lucas.
For the next 38 years, while building a real estate company that developed commercial buildings and over 3,000 apartments, Walsh kept coming back to Holyoke and his legacy provides an interesting parallel to the progress that can be seen all over the city, from downtown revitalization to the rehabilitation of Lyman Terrace public housing to the new community college culinary arts center down by the canal.
According to Holyoke native and local historian Craig Della Penna, Walsh arrived at a time when the city’s buildings were disappearing. “Back in the 1970s, Holyoke was the fire capital of U.S. Then came the municipally-sanctioned demolitions,” said Della Penna. “When I walk around Holyoke, I’m like the kid in the movie ‘Sixth Sense,’ only I see missing buildings.”
Della Penna and Walsh had the same vision. While Della Penna and other locals were forming “Save Historic Holyoke,” Walsh looked for opportunities. In the 1980s, he bought and renovated the historic four-story Caledonian Building into a first class downtown office building. He then turned his attention to the city’s brick buildings and developed over 150 apartments. “Even when the city seemed down and out, he always stuck by Holyoke,” said Marcos Marrero, the city’s economic development director.
Walsh’s final project may be his most memorable. In 2015, he used housing tax credits and a long-term MHP loan to redevelop two Holyoke Catholic school buildings, a rectory and a convent into 54 beautiful affordable apartments. Known as Chestnut Park Apartments, the development was another step forward in the city’s efforts to bring back historic downtown buildings around Veterans Park. “The housing is key,” said Marrero. “We could not have boarded up buildings around that park.”
Walsh also used the project to groom his son Lucas to take over his company, which he did after Denis Walsh died of cancer in 2016 at age 72. In doing so, Walsh also passed on his love of Holyoke. “My dad always made it a point to take me out there and I cut my teeth as a developer on this project,” said Lucas Walsh. “I really got to know what he experienced. There’s something romantic about it, working with people who want good things for their community.”