State joins legal battle over future of former Readville library

A Massachusetts Land Court judge this week agreed to let the state Attorney General's office get into the legal scrum over the future of a former library on Hamilton Street in Hyde Park's Readville neighborhood that is owned by the church next door - which wants to raze it to build apartments.

The key question now is whether a deed recorded in 1897 - through which Ellen Stetson sold a parcel to the Blue Hill Evangelical Society for $1 in exchange for building "a free and public reading room and library" - is a simple deed restriction that a judge can overturn or whether it actually memorialized the creation of a "public trust" required "to suffer said premises to be used for no purposes whatever" other than as a library, as recorded in that deed.

Stetson was a Bostonian who summered in Readville, back when Hyde Park was still a Norfolk County town, and was active in the evangelical society's affairs. After she sold the society the 8,300-square-foot parcel behind its meeting house, the society spent $4,000 to build a library named after Trinity Church pastor Phillips Brooks, who gave one of his last sermons in Readville before his death in 1893. The library operated as a public-library branch for decades, first as part of the Hyde Park library and then, after the town was annexed to Boston in 1912, as a BPL branch. The BPL shut it in 1956.

The society dissolved more than three decades ago, after selling its meeting house and the library building to the Blue Hill Community Church in 1991. The church says the former library s now in such bad shape that the cost of restoring and running it would cause "irreparable harm" to it main mission of being a church. In 2022, it proposed razing the building to make way for a six-unit apartment building.

After the church filed its suit in April, seeking an end to the requirement - technically in the name of the no-longer-existing society against the no-longer-living Ellen Stetson - several nearby residents filed their own suit, arguing that the 1897 deed actually created a charity that committed the society, and now the church, to keep the library open in perpetuity.

At the judge's request, the church hired a genealogist to find possible Stetson heirs - she left no husband or children - and then filed an amended lawsuit that names people living in Roxbury, Nashua, NH and South Carolina as defendants. To date, none have responded to the legal notices the church had published, however.

In July, the church's lawyer sought to have the residents' suit dismissed because state law only lets two types of people legal contest issues related to - the state Attorney General and trustees of that charity - that the residents were neither and that, at least as of that moment, the state AG's office had failed to move to intercede.

That changed in September, however, when assistant Attorney General Emma Winer appeared at a hearing in the case and said the state would intercede, which it formally did through a motion filed last month. While her filing does not say specifically which side, if any, the state will ultimately take on the question of letting the church tear down the library, Winer wrote:

It is prudent for the AGO to be a party in both of these matters [the church suit and the residents suit] given the charitable interests at stake in the Church's attempt to declare the restriction on the Property unenforceable. As a party, the AGO can ensure that arguments regarding the charitable nature of the deed restriction are before the Court as it considers the Church's arguments regarding the applicability of [state law on charitable deed restrictions] to the Property.

In addition to letting the Attorney General's office intercede, Rubin also agreed with its request to combine the two lawsuits into a single case, agreeing with Winer that both suits involved the same general legal issues and the same parcel of land.