Giving new life to old structures

STORY BY FRANCINE ST. LAURENT

Katie Franks jumps into the water at the bottom of the abandoned limestone quarry in her hometown of Columbus, Ohio. She swims around with her high school friends as ancient industrial equipment stands guard. It hasn’t moved in years.

Five-story concrete buildings that once housed concrete-processing equipment still lay plopped around the quarry. Inside, stairways missing railings and a giant conveyor belt appear ready to collapse, she says. Franks explores the deserted rooms, not intimidated by the eerie stillness. She looks past it all and imagines more.

“[It] gets my juices flowing thinking, ‘Wow, what could this [room] be?’” says Franks, historic preservation planner for the City of Bellingham.

This “rehab fever” led her to purchase her first home in downtown Columbus, Ohio. The building was a run-down structure in need of a lot of love, she says. The building, set in a sea of brick houses, streets and sidewalks, was abandoned for five years. A striking, blocked-off Palladian window and the house’s lonesomeness sparked Franks’ interest in historic preservation and repurposing.

To repurpose is to change something’s use; to adapt it for another function, says Neil McCarthy, an architect at Bellingham’s RMC Architects. It’s a tool architects have applied to building design for decades, he says. Today, Bellingham property owners take advantage of local and federal programs, such as the Federal Historic Preservation Tax Incentive Program and Bellingham Historic Register, which offer tax incentives for adaptive reuse projects that retain a community’s character and give new life to structures with more years to give.

“[A building] has its own life,” McCarthy says. “Sometimes you have a mismatch between what the building does in terms of its function for those who are using it and what it does for its function for urban design.”

Structures in an urban setting are part of history and contribute to the street, McCarthy says. His business, RMC Architects, is developing plans to repurpose an old automotive part store on the corner of East Holly and North Forest streets. The Bellingham Food Co-op owns the building, which was formerly a used clothing store.

New design with elements of old architecture provides opportunities for creativity.

“I enjoy designing when I am reacting to something,” McCarthy says. “I have something to comment on from an aesthetic point rather than having a blank piece of paper and inventing something from scratch. You’re having a conversation with the building that was there.”

RMC Architects will change the automotive part store’s facades, flush concrete walls and simple windows, but the structure’s shape will remain the same, McCarthy says. Offices, a classroom and a small bakery will occupy its repurposed interior.

“I think different uses can be accommodated in different ways and sometimes when you see a [use] accommodated in an unusual way, a little bit of poetry starts to happen,” McCarthy says.

The workmanship and texture of older structures attracts people, Franks says. A warehouse-turned-loft is funky.

“We go to Europe and [see] these places that have old buildings and cobblestone streets,” Franks says. “You forget we have old stuff here. The longer you wait, the older they get. If you take them down because you think, ‘This isn’t old,’ then you’re never going to have anything that’s old.”

In recent years, the city hired consultants with federal grant money to survey historic buildings and neighborhoods, Franks says. With the data, the city designated the Sehome, Broadway Park, Fairhaven, York, Eldridge and South Hill historic districts and continues to apply for survey grants. This information and historic photos help property owners make informed decisions, Franks says.

“Say they want to put a new porch on,” Franks says, “Well, here’s what it used to look like. It gives them a place to start if they choose to go that route.”

Property owners who repurpose Bellingham Historic Register structures can take advantage of local tax incentives, such as special valuation. This reduces state property tax and allows more flexible permits, such as the conditional and adaptive use permits. The Historic Preservation Commission reviews buildings before they are listed and any future modifications must undergo an additional design review.

These incentives allowed the owner of the Fire House Cafe, once the Fairhaven Fire Station, on Harris Avenue to forgo surrounding single-family zoning that would have required it be turned into a house when the city sold it, Franks says. The facility was adapted into the performing arts center, cafe and commercial offices it is today.

Properties listed on the National Historic Register, the official list of historic districts, sites, buildings and structures, are eligible for the Federal Historic Preservation Tax Incentive Program, which offers 10 to 20 percent tax credit for rehabilitation projects.

The financial incentives encourage repurposing projects, such as a building on Astor Street. It was built in 1906 as the School of Industries and was used as a taxidermy office toward the end of the century until its owner hired Fred Wagner, an architect at Grinstad and Wagner Architects in Bellingham, to repurpose it in 2007. Today it bears a fresh resemblance to its original appearance, its weathered rustic red repeated in a brighter new coat. It houses a hair salon and chiropractic business on the first floor, four condominiums on the second floor and a level of underground parking.

Reusing salvageable structures and materials is a sustainable practice, McCarthy says, because many older buildings’ brick, stone, sandstone and timber beams were meant to last 100 years.

Many Bellingham buildings have been repurposed as property owners take advantage of these programs. The Herald building, owned by Daylight Properties, is undergoing a transformation, Franks says. With incremental updates, residential units and street-level stores will eventually be leased. An oyster bar will open where a fur shop was once located.

“[The owner’s] goal is to use the footprints of the old storefronts,” Franks says.

Historic photos aid that process, helping architects and owners glimpse a building’s past life, Franks says. If a portion has been quickly fixed or covered and obscures original features, photographs can help owners decide how to begin.

Yet repurposing can be expensive, Franks says. City fees, such as the transportation impact fee, can add up. Fees can potentially be reduced if an owner can show the building’s original use through historic photos.

Financing these projects deters property owners, Wagner says. Banks are less comfortable loaning money to repurpose older buildings.

“It can be riskier if it’s not done right,” McCarthy says. “Sometimes it’s easier for those who are making the dollars available to know what the formula is and know if you do a building in this particular way, you expect that building to last.”

Adaptive reuse doesn’t always make economic sense, McCarthy says. In an affordable housing project he worked on, McCarthy and his colleagues studied the former Walton Beverage warehouse on North State Street, a one-story brick building not on the historic register and decided it would be too expensive to maintain.

“It would jeopardize [the owner’s] ability to provide affordable housing,” McCarthy says.

They cleared the site and started fresh, keeping an art-deco doorway as a “nod to the past.”

“We wanted to keep that culture around and touch base with what was there before,” McCarthy says.

Repurposing buildings preserves a street’s history and brings new life to forgotten spaces. As property owners take advantage of programs that reward creative reuse, new tenants, like Franks in her Columbus, Ohio home, can honor and use old places.