How to eulogize a building? What can be said of Peabody and Sanborn — about to be reduced to ignominious piles of rubble, scooped up, and deposited tens if not hundreds of miles away? A bittersweet moment.
Certainly the new middle school will have its benefits — clocks that work, classroom doors, and water fountains with water pressure. Such a eulogy could begin by zooming out, to an atmospheric level, where Peabody stands out boldly as a white “X” marking the spot visible from high altitudes. One knows exactly where they are in town, even at height.
Zooming further in, both buildings stand as memorials on their own of a particularly important moment in the town’s history — constructed to handle an influx of children as Concord transitioned from rural to suburban. Powder Mill Road transitions from dirt to asphalt, the dairy cows vanish, the freight trains cease running through.
Peabody’s interiors (the ones I am most familiar with) speak to a 20th-century past with wood paneling and hastily reconstructed walls to divide up what had once been open floor space as part of cutting-edge “open concept” learning of the early ’70s, though how much was learned by any one pupil having to listen to six classes simultaneously in a wing is debatable.
Then, zooming in further there’s the staff, people I can recall from my days: Linda Penniston, Cindy Larson, Mary Jenkinson, Sharon Moss, Tom Delicandro, Paul Crowley, Dan Murphy, Maryann Moran, Maria Sira, and Matthew Cadigan. Some still on the payroll, but most, like the schools themselves, will come to exist only in the imagination of the imaginer.
A bittersweet moment, indeed.
Max Close
Hale Street, Beverly
