PreservationNation

If there’s such a thing as a preservation superhero, I think we just found one.

Becky Anderson bought and restored her first old house in Burlington, Iowa, in 1994. Then, in 1998, she bought and restored the house next door. In 2000, she tried to buy another house, but lost it in a bidding war. In 2001, she saw a for-sale sign at a ramshackle hilltop Italianate, crawled through a broken bay window to check it out, and proceeded to buy, completely renovate and restore it, and move in.

City Councilmember and developer Becky Anderson in her element (left); and looking over the city of Burlington from her restored Italianate home (right). (Photos: Steve Frevert and Becky Anderson)

Recognize her story? I know I do. Preservation can be an addicting hobby. Fix up one place and pretty soon you want to fix up another. For Becky Anderson, the hobby didn’t stop with houses. In 2008, her daughter, a local real estate agent, told her about the Hedge Building, a Victorian Gothic main street commercial building built in the 1880s that was on the market. Anderson remembers, “The amount of original woodwork and detail in the building was amazing. I was thinking, ‘could I take this on?’”

With the help of Federal and State Historic Preservation Tax Credits, and a tenant (her own financial services company) ready and willing to take office space on the first floor, pieces started to fall in place. “We moved into our new offices in February 2009, with the front of the building still not completed. The building had been a men’s clothing store and the storefront had been drastically altered in the 1940s. It took another eight months to recreate a limestone storefront similar to the original.”

Installing the recreated limestone storefront at the Hedge Building. (Photos: Steve Frevert)

Remember: preservation superhero. Always moving, always saving. Since 2005, Becky Anderson has also been president of the Capitol Theater Foundation, a group formed to save and rehab the 1937 Art Deco jewel in downtown Burlington. In 2010 the group was awarded at $1 million grant from I-JOBS, an Iowa state initiative to fund local infrastructure projects. But Anderson is quick to take a back seat: “I have just been one of many who have worked on this project.” The Capitol Theater is expected to open in May.

Meanwhile, she was elected to the Burlington City Council last fall and is currently working on another historic building restoration downtown. After hearing about the projects she’s worked on, I knew I needed to raise the bat signal and talk to her in person. Read the rest of this entry »

Nominations are now open for the 2012 Richard H. Driehaus National Preservation Awards. We’ll be highlighting a few of our favorites from last year here on the blog to give you a sense of what’s won in the past, and hope to see some of your projects here when the winners are announced at the 2012 National Preservation Conference in Spokane, Washington, on November 2!

Minvilla Manor – Knoxville, Tennessee
2011 National Trust/HUD Award

In the early 20th century, Fifth and Broadway was just a streetcar ride away from the bustling heart of Knoxville’s commercial center, and the 13 Minvilla townhomes were the height of sophisticated living for the city’s growing middle class. By the 1960s, however, the townhomes had been converted into the Fifth Avenue Motel, a magnet for crime.

In 2006, just four years after the building was condemned by the City of Knoxville, a private social services agency purchased the old Minvilla development and made it the flagship project of the city’s pioneering Ten-Year Plan to End Chronic Homelessness. Using a complex mix of public and private funds, the agency enlisted the help of local craftspeople to meticulously repair and reconstruct the building’s historic features. The notorious motel was reborn as Minvilla Manor: 57 studio and one-bedroom units of permanent supportive housing for the formerly homeless - all of which meet ENERGY STAR standards. The restoration is part of a larger revitalization in the area, and it has set an example for new commercial and residential development in the surrounding area.

Each year the National Trust for Historic Preservation celebrates the best of preservation by presenting the Richard H. Driehaus National Preservation Awards to individuals and organizations whose contributions demonstrate excellence in historic preservation. We invite you to nominate a deserving individual, organization, agency, or project for a Richard H. Driehaus National Preservation Award. The nomination deadline for all awards is March 15, 2012.

Written by Kevin Shea Adams. [This post first appeared on the author's personal blog on January 24, 2012.]

A friend of mine once told me that your bodega knows all your darkest secrets. Being my primary water supply, East Village Farm on Avenue A in the East Village may know me better than I know myself. When I heard that they were closing I found it hard to believe; it’s clean, friendly, busy and, well, pricey. I always assumed it had long ago cleared the zenith of the retail life-cycle and was well into piloting the stratosphere of boundless, automatic prosperity. But this bodega has its own secret, one that anybody looking at the building from across the street will wonder: what’s upstairs?

The building’s exterior today. (Photo: Kevin Shea Adams)

A giant windowless brick shell traversed only by an old, warped fire escape juts up some 40 feet directly above the store front – a giant black box. I learned from people in the neighborhood that this was once the old Hollywood Theatre which shut down in 1959 – but what was more surprising was when I found out it wasn’t just another dusty, gutted empty space, but that it was the functional store room for my dearest bodega! If the store was my sparkling spring, this was its cavernous aquifer.

Not your everyday shop storage space. (Photo: Kevin Shea Adams)

I began asking regularly about going upstairs at every two-dollar hydration visit. I wanted to photograph it, and at one point late at night did receive permission, only to return the following day to be met with language barriers and gestures of denial. Eventually, I found my friend working again and received an invitation to return “after midnight.” So I showed up with my camera and tripod – he warned me there was only one light, but it was plenty. Walking through the back, past all the things you would expect, and up a small staircase deposits you stage-left in this little store’s swollen subconscious.

It’s been a while since theater-goers sat here. (Photo: Kevin Shea Adams)

After spending at least an hour shooting up there, I came down and gladly purchased a $15.50 six-pack of bud light. I’ll miss this place and the kind ladies who would sometimes slip a Haribo gummy pack into your bag. Rumor is the building and the old theatre are to be torn down very soon to make way for new development, and East Village Farm will be closed in just a few weeks.

Kevin Shea Adams is a photographer and musician living in New York City.

For another side of the story, read The Local East Village’s story about the bodega’s closing and the building’s possible future.