A Joint Meeting was held of Keene's Planning Licenses and Development Committee combined with the Keene Planning Board on June 13, 2016. Planner Tara Kessler walked through the City of Keene East Side Redevelopment presentation. The presentation outlines upcoming municipal projects for the area bounded by Beaver Street, Eastern Ave., Brown/Tinn Streets and Main Street for the period starting 2017. More to follow A Community Forum was held on February 24, 2015 in downtown Keene to solicit and generate dynamic ideas for the underutilized buildings along the East side of Keene along Beaver Brook. Mr. James Gruber of Antioch University New England led a brainstorming session on what the participants would like to see in the former industrial corridor.
City Staff then led the participants through an exercise of prioritizing their ideas and facilitators at each table assisted small groups to develop ideas on individual site maps. Each table did a brief verbal report highlighting the ideas they had developed and Architect Dan Scully drew visual themes of ideas he saw being repeated in the room.
The following documents summarize the verbal ideas generated by participants during and after the forum:
Prioritized Brainstorming Ideas Generated during the Meeting
Ideas written on Community Forum Response Cards at the Meeting & Keene Sentinel Comments afterward
Ideas gathered online at the Keene MindMixer Website afterward and summarized.
Additionally, a Conceptual Plan gathered the visual data that groups drew on each of the maps at their individual tables.
The meeting’s participants expressed a desire for green infrastructure to address increasing storm events as well as diverse land uses and creative redevelopment projects that would generate a broader base of employment, prosperity and vibrancy to this east side of downtown.