A Small College Divides Its Village With Unusual Attempt to Revive It

Are Wells and a wealthy alumna improving Aurora, N.Y., or remaking it in kitsch?

By AUDREY Y. WILLIAMS

In this remote Finger Lakes village where this time of year brings towering snowdrifts and few, if any, visitors, life has stayed pretty much the same for decades.

Aurora is home to rambling lakefront houses, a few dairy farms, and Wells College, a 459-student women's institution near the village limits. Residents know which of their neighbors are old money, but Aurora's well-to-do aren't showy. Everyone here runs into everyone else at one of two places: the village post office or the dump.

There's no movie theater, chain restaurant, or shopping mall. In fact, Aurora's tiny business district, on a state highway that doubles as Main Street, never fully recovered from a 1919 fire that nearly wiped it out.

Aurora's 720 or so residents, more than half of them students at Wells, have learned to make do with what the carefully preserved 19th-century village has to offer. In the space of less than a city block, the business district includes a bank, a hardware store, a clothing and gift shop, a massage therapist, and an antique-lighting store. Aurora's economy, largely propped up by Wells, has managed to elude the total collapse that has befallen other villages in the region. Villagers and visitors, though, spend most of their money in nearby Auburn, Ithaca, and Syracuse.

Wells, fearing further deterioration, a year ago announced a plan to spruce up Aurora, in a move to broaden the village's appeal. But the plan's details have divided locals, in a conflict more bitter than any that can be remembered here.

The college, owner of much of Aurora's commercial property, has agreed to let one of its top donors, doll magnate and alumna Pleasant T. Rowland, use her money to renovate at least seven Wells properties worth $1-million. The college and Ms. Rowland have formed the Aurora Foundation, a limited-liability company, to renovate and manage the properties, which include the campus golf course but are largely off campus. The foundation will then absorb any operating losses and turn any revenue over to Wells. Ms. Rowland's own foundation holds the controlling interest in the new entity whose board she leads.

Ms. Rowland, who lives in Madison, Wis., also has shelled out top dollar for village landmarks, including a high-end pottery and home-furnishings factory that she rescued from bankruptcy. It is the only industry to speak of in the village.

She plans to make one of the two well-known houses she has purchased her residence when she's in town. A popular variety store that Ms. Rowland bought is now part ice-cream parlor, part trendy cafe. It's connected to a gift shop with a hodgepodge of items, including greeting cards, jewelry, and hand-painted bowls from China.

The retail venture is a foreshadowing, some worry, of what the end result will be of every commercial renovation backed by Ms. Rowland's cash: a village of kitsch.

Some say a makeover is long overdue. Others like Aurora the way it is. Still others say the revitalization plan gives too much power to one person -- and an outsider to boot. Either way, most in Aurora are unhappy about the discord the Wells-Rowland project has spawned.

"It has introduced a level of divisiveness that's sad," says village historian Sheila Edmunds, who is skeptical about whether Aurora will be better off in the end.

The college, some say, shouldn't be dictating the local agenda.

"This is an academic institution telling us what is good for us and telling us we should want it," says Karen A. Hindenlang, a village resident and Wells alumna. "I think they should know better. There was a village before there was a college."

The two, however, are deeply intertwined. Some of the people who approved the renovations are Wells employees, including members of the planning board, and Mayor Thomas H. Gunderson, the college's superintendent of buildings and grounds.

Lately, talk has risen to a fever pitch, as the college resumes the $6-million renovation of the nearly 170-year-old Aurora Inn, at the heart of the village. Wells, the owner of the three-story brick-and wood-building, shut it down 15 months ago after nearly a decade of trying to stem losses from its operation.

The plan, in part, is to reopen an "improved" inn by demolishing two rear additions to the building, gutting its interior, and reducing the number of rooms from 14 small ones to 10 spacious, more luxurious accommodations. A market next door, the only grocery store in town, will come down to make room for a new, larger one.

A group of about 75 residents, including Wells faculty members and alumnae, better known as the Aurora Coalition, has sued Wells, the village, and its planning and preservation boards in state court to stop the remodeling. Coalition members say the renovation, among other things, wasn't reviewed properly by Aurora officials, and it doesn't take into consideration that the village -- with it's roughly 100 buildings, including the Wells campus -- is included on the National Register of Historic Places.

The court disagreed, although it briefly halted the construction in December with a restraining order that was later lifted. The coalition appealed the decision and an appeals court will hear arguments in the case later in February.

Coalition members, along with a state and a national preservation group that support them want to see a revitalized Aurora, including the inn, but they want to see it done in a way that won't alter Aurora's historic flavor, says Ms. Hindenlang, the group's vice president.

But from Lisa Marsh Ryerson's vantage point, Wells doesn't have time to wait and would be foolish not to move ahead when it has a donor ready to act.

The 17th president of Wells College is tired of the institution carrying an average of $250,000 annually in losses from the Aurora Inn on its books. The inn, on the eastern shore of Cayuga Lake, closed occasionally over the years and went through several managers. None of them was able to draw visitors and diners to the property, whose heyday ended in the late 1980s. In addition, Wells's other holdings, such as an aging guest house and the village's only bar, were draining resources at the college, which has a somewhat wobbly financial picture.

In October 2000, Wells's Board of Trustees agreed to close the Aurora Inn, a year after a study commissioned by the college revealed that the inn needed extensive renovations to ever break even. Ms. Ryerson tapped Ms. Rowland, class of 1962, for help.

"When I called her I thought 'The worst she could say is No,'" Ms. Ryerson says. "But I thought of her because she has the financial resources as well as business acumen."

Ms. Rowland made her fortune through the Pleasant Company, producer of American Girl dolls, books, and accessories, sold mostly through catalogs. The pricey dolls, about $90, represent girls in different periods of American history, and include Felicity, a colonial girl from Williamsburg, Va., and Addy, an African-American girl who escaped slavery with her mother during the Civil War. Ms. Rowland sold her 12-year-old company to Mattel in 1998 for $700-million.

In Madison, Ms. Rowland and her husband, W. Jerome Frautschi, have spent millions of dollars on causes that include an arts complex and a children's museum. A longtime donor to Wells, she pledged $2-million in 1995 to refurbish the campus's public spaces, such as building lobbies and dormitory lounges.

By February 2001, Ms. Ryerson and Ms. Rowland had talked enough about how the movement to revitalize Aurora should take shape to announce it to the village. Ms. Rowland was already starting to buy properties in the village that may eventually be folded into the Aurora Foundation.

Meanwhile, it was impossible for the college to quash the rumors brewing about plans that were already in motion.

Ms. Rowland came to Aurora in May to make her case before an overflow crowd at the village's Morgan Opera House. That same month, the Wells board had formally approved the college's participation in the Aurora Foundation.

She declined comment for this article. But at the village meeting, Ms. Rowland said the Aurora Foundation wanted to help, but couldn't "in an environment of distrust, suspicion, and confrontation." She asked people to give the foundation a "chance to earn your trust as we help execute this vision."

Making money in Aurora, she told villagers, was not her goal. "I need no return on my investment," she said. "I want no return. I will take no return."

Ms. Rowland began her speech by describing what made Aurora the right place for her to attend college. She ended with a promise of "a second sunrise" for the village.

Resident Ann Burch, who heard Ms. Rowland's speech, says of her message: "If she thought Aurora was so wonderful, why does she want to change it?"

The project's supporters say naysayers just don't trust Ms. Ryerson's leadership of Wells.

"The real opposition and threat to this project seems to be a small, well-organized crusade determined to discredit the leadership at Wells," wrote Aurora shop owner and Wells alumna Randi Shaw Zabriskie in a recent letter printed in the college's alumnae magazine. "The greater good of the many must not be harmed by the agendas of few."

Coalition members say it's possible that they also have the support of many villagers who agree with them, but can't do so in public because they work for Wells. Many of the coalition's members are anonymous, says Ms. Hindenlang.

"People often ask how you can go against the company in a company town. I think it's very difficult, and I think people have paid a price," says Bruce Bennett, a coalition member and a tenured English professor at Wells. "I don't like the position of being at odds with my community, but I also don't want to be made to feel guilty."

Neither does Ms. Ryerson.

"We're not averse to making money. We have to find other sources of revenue," says Ms. Ryerson, who couldn't say how much cash she thought a renovated inn would bring in. "We're a small college with limited resources. We are not in the business of operating buildings, and I'm not going to back down from that stance."

Like most small, private colleges, Wells depends on tuition. According to The Fiske Guide to Colleges 2002, the college had 410 applicants; 90 percent were accepted, but only 37 percent enrolled. Enrollment has hovered in the 300s for years, although in the last five years, it has grown from 316 to 459. That growth came after the college slashed tuition 30 percent in 1999.

Wells recently completed a $58-million capital campaign. In addition, it received a $20.2-million gift in December, the largest in the college's history. However, Wells's endowment lost 22.1 percent of its value in the 2001 fiscal year, one of the largest percentage losses of any college. The college attributes the drop to investments in technology stocks that were battered in that sector's downturn. Wells's endowment is now about $46.5-million.

Ms. Ryerson says that with a revitalized village as a backdrop, it should be much easier to recruit faculty members and students.

"It's very important for them that they have the opportunity to walk down Main Street in their town and have somewhere to stop," Ms. Ryerson says. "Students and faculty are never going to have all of their needs met here, but we can meet some of them. A strong village equals a strong college."

Coalition members worry about how the rest of the village's commercial properties will be revamped. Details haven't been revealed to villagers or town officials yet. Catharine B. Waller, executive director of the Aurora Foundation and Ms. Rowland's spokeswoman in the village, says the foundation is simply focusing on getting the inn reopened according to plan. Ms. Ryerson maintains that Wells doesn't yet know what changes will be made to its buildings.

Mr. Bennett doesn't believe it.

"If there are no overall plans, then there probably should be," he says. "People keep saying 'What are the plans?' They want to know what's going on."

Coalition members, says Linda S. Schwab, a tenured Wells chemistry professor, "are fairly forthright people who don't much like to be stonewalled. We all wanted to avoid a lawsuit, but that was our only choice."

Says Ms. Ryerson: "It's very tough for people to understand Pleasant's spirit of generosity."

She's right.

Seven years ago, some residents of Mount Kisco, N.Y., in Westchester County, fought a year-long battle to keep Ms. Rowland from turning a Victorian mansion into a tea house and a museum dedicated to the dolls that made her rich. Mount Kisco officials eventually approved the museum, but not the tea house. The neighbors filed a lawsuit to block the project, but Ms. Rowland pulled away from the deal because the entire package wasn't approved.

"Miss Pleasant wants to do the best she can by Wells. The reality is, what's best for the institution in many cases and what she thinks is best are two different things," says Michael A. Tomlan, director of the graduate program in historic preservation planning at Cornell University and a coalition supporter. "But the college certainly wants to seize this opportunity. The central administration thinks they're doing the best they can with the situation and how it's been presented."

Like the Aurora Foundation, coalition members are now focused on the inn. Persuading a state appeals court to nullify the project's permits is their goal. The inn's renovation, at least a year behind schedule, will be complete next summer if a judge rules in the college's favor.

About three weeks ago, a chain-link fence went up around the inn, marking it as an official construction site. It was a clear signal to all that Ms. Rowland's money, at least for now, is again at work.

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