Amelia Massucco has fallen in love.

With a 92-year-old building in downtown Quilcene.

Massucco, who has lived in Quilcene for
11 years, got involved in helping resurrect the Gray Coast Guildhall in 2018. A colleague had the bright idea to buy the building, which has served as a movie theatre, thrift shop, and lumber mill in past iterations. (It’s also an informal advertisement board, as one entire wall is hand painted with local businesses motifs.)

The Gray Coast Guildhall Collective now formally owns the old theatre under a setup as a limited liability corporation. There’s fewer than 10 people involved. It’s small-scale, for a small town.

But Massucco has big plans.

“We want Quilcene to have a theatre again,” she said.

Right now, the place is a little, well, rustic.

“A roof and four walls,” she said, plus a bathroom. The single wood stove isn’t really set up to do much to heat the space.

The hall was open just long enough to host some work parties and musicians, like Sequim’s Lavender Country, before the pandemic put the kibosh on gatherings. While that could have caused Massucco and her cohorts to get bogged down in apathy, they took the proactive approach, and started looking at what it would take to really save — not just patch up — the hall.

The collective launched a GoFundMe in late November (gofundme.com/f/guildhall-new-roof-and-accessible-entryway). Right now, the main goal is paying for a new roof.

It’s a volunteer effort, Massucco said. A Patreon account, where folks can sign up to donate a continuous monthly gift of any amount, has been helping pay the bills and brings much needed encouragement and support.

“Just seeing the building, you want it to be a current asset for the community,” she said.

The hall, as Massucco envisions it, will be a spacious, creative, well-appointed haven for artists and performers, community members, children, and everything in between.

One of the assets of the Guildhall is the space. Massucco talked about how many locals live in small spaces, limited in some way. Having access to a big room to enact their dreams, from paintings to performance, is something the collective wants to champion.

It’s really meant to be a neighborhood space to “learn, teach, and skill-share,” she added. She loves hearing stories of the building’s other lives, and invites locals to share their lore.

And speaking of sharing, the guildhall’s front porch housed a mutual aid freezer full of Otter Pops and frozen bottles of water during the heat wave this past summer, free for the community. It’s these gestures of generosity that Massucco knows will just keep coming as the project expands.

“I definitely anticipate the space getting more use,” Massucco said, adding that she feels the pandemic is easing.

The Guildhall has a strict 50 percent capacity maximum, and requires the audience to be masked, as well.

“So far, we ask people to pass a hat for donations,” she said, for using the space. Right now, it just isn’t a place the collective can rent.

“It needs a lot of work,” she said.

But that’s not all bad.

“The building is like a canvas,” Massucco said.

And that means countless possibilities abound.