For four years, the former Medfield State Hospital campus has functioned as an unusual kind of town amenity. It was a place residents walked through, ran a 5K on, watched a Norfolk Hunt Club pace across, and occasionally caught an outdoor concert on. It was open, unstructured, and mostly unbooked. That is not what it is anymore.
On June 1, 2026, Bellforge Arts Center broke ground on the Lee Chapel and the adjacent Infirmary at 45 Hospital Road, and the grounds shifted from a place you drift onto to a place you plan around. If you live in Medfield and have not been up to the site since spring, the fall calendar is where you will feel that shift first.
What The June 1 Groundbreaking Actually Started
The scale of the project is easy to underestimate from the road. Bellforge is spending $30 million to convert two buildings that most of us have only ever seen boarded up. The Lee Chapel is being reworked into a 300-seat flexible performance venue, and the Infirmary next door is becoming 17 practice rooms and classrooms, with a new glass connector serving as the central lobby and gallery. Doors are expected to open in the fall of 2027.
The context worth holding in your head: Bellforge has already drawn more than 42,000 visitors to the campus since 2022 without a permanent building. Everything to date has happened outdoors. What breaks ground now is the infrastructure that lets the campus operate year-round, in weather, on a schedule. DBVW Architects designed the project. Delphi Construction is the general contractor.
The buildings sit on land the Town of Medfield bought from the state in 2014, and the redevelopment has been talked about for so long that it has started to feel like a permanent condition rather than a project with an end date. That changed the moment the fencing went up around the active work zone.
What Access Looks Like While The Work Is Underway
The campus is still open. That is the first thing to know. Most of the construction work is happening inside the two buildings, and outdoor work is limited to daytime hours, Monday through Friday. Bellforge's general contractor monitors air quality hourly during active work, and a 6,000-gallon water tank has been installed on site as a precaution against dust.
For daily use, three things have changed:
- Dogs must be leashed in the core campus and at any Bellforge event. Off-leash use is still permitted in the front and back fields. If you have been walking the property off-leash for years, the fenced area near the chapel is where that ends.
- The active work zone is fenced. If a route you used to take crossed near the Lee Chapel or Infirmary, expect to reroute.
- Some exterior work will be visible and audible. Roof repair and masonry repointing are the loudest of it. Weekends should be quiet.
The Bellforge team has directed residents to contact Medfield Police or Fire for any safety concern on the campus during construction, rather than the arts center itself.
The Fall Schedule Worth Putting On The Calendar
Bellforge has said 95% of its events are free of charge, and the fall lineup follows that pattern. What is different this year is density. Programming is concentrated on the campus grounds through the Halloween wrap-up, and a signature event has moved off-site for the town's 375th anniversary.
| Event | Format | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Summer Sounds | Live music, local craft beer, picnic-style evenings | Bellforge campus, front lawn |
| Zach Nugent's Dead Set | Grateful Dead tribute, September afternoon on the lawn | Bellforge campus |
| Medfield's 375th Anniversary Party in the Park | Live music, food, family activities, follows the town parade | Meetinghouse Pond, downtown Medfield |
| Fall family day | Hands-on art, music, creative play, seasonal activities | Bellforge campus |
| Halloween wrap-up | Lantern parade, live music, outdoor screening of Hocus Pocus | Bellforge campus |
The Summer Sounds series has been running with three nights: June 24, July 22, and August 12, from 6 to 8 p.m., free with RSVP. Zach Nugent's Dead Set is a ticketed September afternoon show, which is worth flagging because it is one of the few fall Bellforge events that is not free. Everything else on the campus this fall reads as either community programming or seasonal family programming.
If you have children in the house, the fall family day and the Halloween lantern parade are the ones to circle. If you have out-of-town guests visiting in October, the Halloween evening with an outdoor Hocus Pocus screening on the campus grounds is unlike anything the town offered five years ago.
Why Party In The Park Landed At Meetinghouse Pond Instead
The 375th Anniversary is the largest civic moment of the year, and Bellforge could have hosted it on the campus. It didn't. Party in the Park follows the town's anniversary parade and takes place at Meetinghouse Pond in downtown Medfield, with Bellforge providing the music, food coordination, and family activities.
The choice is worth reading closely. Meetinghouse Pond is one of the oldest public spaces in town, and putting the anniversary there rather than on Hospital Road signals something about how Bellforge is positioning itself. The arts center is not trying to pull civic life out of downtown. It is trying to be one of two anchors, with the historic center as the other. For a town that has spent a decade worrying about whether the state hospital redevelopment would drain energy away from Main Street, that is a meaningful decision.
The Bigger Shift Behind The Programming
The fall calendar is the visible layer. Underneath it is a redevelopment that has been in motion for more than a decade and is now moving faster than most residents realize.
Trinity Financial is separately advancing 334 apartments on 45 acres adjacent to the Bellforge property, 25% of which will be affordable. Medfield expects the finished project to generate roughly $700,000 annually in additional property tax revenue and to put the town over the state's Chapter 40B threshold. Trinity has agreed to fund improvements at three intersections including Harding/Hospital and Harding/North, plus pay $1 million in mitigation for the schools. In March 2024, the state allocated nearly $5 million through the Community One Stop for Growth Program toward infrastructure and hazardous materials work at the site.
Two separate projects on the same historic campus, sharing infrastructure, moving in parallel. The Cultural Alliance of Medfield, which holds a 99-year lease on two buildings adjacent to the Bellforge site, is the third partner in the picture and will operate its own arts programming under a separate structure.
For a resident, the practical translation is this: what used to be a quiet open space with occasional weekend activity is becoming a year-round destination with housing, arts programming, restored historic buildings, and preserved open fields around them. The fall calendar is the first season where all three layers are visible at once.
If You Have Not Been Up There Since Spring
Go on a weekday morning if you want to see the work in progress without event traffic. The Chapel and Infirmary sit at the core of the campus, with the front and back fields still open for off-leash walking. The fringe tree on the front Great Lawn is worth the walk on its own. Delphi's exterior work will taper as the interior phase deepens, so this fall is one of the last windows where you will see the buildings mid-transformation from the outside.
For evening plans, the Bellforge grounds pair well with a downtown dinner. Avenue on Main Street has been running its scratch-kitchen model since 2016 with menus that shift by season, and Noon Hill Grill on Main is the standby closer to the campus. Basil, another neighborhood spot, changes its menu with the market. None of these existed as a coordinated evening the way they do now, when the anchor is a concert on the front lawn rather than a drive to Boston.
The next fifteen months are the transition period. By fall 2027, Bellforge expects doors to open on a 300-seat indoor venue that will host programming through the winter, and Trinity's first apartments will be closer to occupancy. The campus that most of us have thought of as "the old state hospital" for twenty-three years is going to have a different name in daily conversation soon. It already does among residents who have been paying attention.
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