Great Barrington — Less than a month since Bard College announced that it intends to close its Simon’s Rock campus by the end of the spring 2025 semester, community members have formed a group to look at potentially purchasing the campus.
Two of the members of the group are Great Barrington residents Peter Most and Steve Picheny. Most is a local attorney and a regular columnist for The Berkshire Edge. Picheny is a local entrepreneur and a former chair of the Great Barrington Economic Development Committee.
“We’re a bunch of concerned citizens from South County who all want to see what we as a community can do to make the best use of Simon’s Rock,” Picheny said. “We want to see if we can do something that will better the community and take [the closure of the campus] and make it into something good.”
“The group has been formed because we recognize that Simon’s Rock is integral to our community, and we want to preserve it,” Most said. “Our working hypothesis is that it will be easier to accomplish the purchase of Simon’s Rock with a number of us pulling together interested groups. We have put together a group of individuals who have varied interests and varied professional expertise. By pulling all these individuals together, we think we can accomplish the purchase or preservation of the campus. What we would like to avoid is having a housing developer coming in, tearing down the buildings on the property, and just making it housing. Many good things already exist at Simon’s Rock, and we want to make sure it continues.”
When asked, Picheny said he would not reveal the names of all 20 of the group’s members but did divulge some: Great Barrington Selectboard Chair and Berkshire Hills Regional School District Chair Steve Bannon; Great Barrington Selectboard Vice Chair and 3rd Berkshire District State Representative-elect Leigh Davis; Great Barrington Planning Board member Pedro Pachano; Great Barrington Public Theater Artistic Director Jim Frangione; Berkshire South Regional Community Center Erica Jaffe; Berkshire Film and Media Collaborative Executive Director Diane Pearlman; and attorney and Egremont Municipal Housing Trust member Doug Mishkin.
“The hypothesis that we have is that it would be possible for the community to purchase various interests [on the campus] in small bites, then bind together to keep the property together, rather than looking for funding for one large $30 million bite,” Most said. “That number is just an estimate, but [purchasing the campus] is easily divisible. The concept is that the members of the Kilpatrick Athletic Center might want to raise the capital for its purchase, arts entities might be interested in buying the Daniel Arts Center and they might raise funds for its purchase. There might be groups interested in workforce housing that might want to raise funds to purchase existing housing on the property. The idea is to raise capital for what each group is interested in preserving and then pull the funds together for the entire purchase.”
Picheny said that the group has had informal conversations with Bard College, but the campus has not been put on the market as of yet. “We are trying to get a jump on [the purchase],” Picheny said. “The college has not yet set a price for it. They have not talked about what the process is going to look like, but we feel that to do what we’re talking about doing, we need to get as much of a jump on it as we possibly can. We also need to get all of the information that we possibly can to start making some informed decisions and find out the possibility of moving forward.”
Both Picheny and Most said that the group has only met once so far and has not yet developed a plan on any potential purchases. “What compelled us to form this group and get people involved is that this is an opportunity of a lifetime to do something impactful for the southern Berkshires,” Picheny said. “Think about this: 275 acres and 40 or so buildings available all running on town sewer and water. We should be able to find a way to make something at the campus that will benefit our community.”
“The redevelopment of Simon’s Rock can go either very well or poorly,” Most said. “A good outcome is preserving the unique assets—the gym, the theater, the housing—as well as saving jobs and creating additional workforce housing. A poor outcome would be losing these assets to new multi-acre housing. We only get one shot at this, and I want to help get us to a good outcome for Great Barrington.”
