Historic Buildings

For thirty-one years I made my living putting up new buildings, so no one in this town can accuse me of sentimentality about old ones. I have poured foundations for strip malls and framed more ranch houses than I can count, and I am proud of that work. But I spent the last decade of my career inside buildings put up between 1880 and 1920, and I came to a conclusion that surprised me: we are throwing away the best-made things we own.

Consider the Corliss Block on Front Street, which its owner has asked permission to demolish. Its walls are three courses of brick laid in lime mortar. Its floor joists are old-growth pine, denser than anything a lumberyard can sell you today. The building has come through two floods and a fire next door. The structure proposed to replace it will be wood frame wrapped in vinyl siding, with a design life that its own engineer puts at fifty years. We would be trading a building that has already lasted 130 years for one that is expected to last fifty.

There is also the matter of waste. When a building comes down, nearly all of it goes to a landfill. Every brick in the Corliss Block was fired in a kiln more than a century ago; the energy that went into making it has already been spent. Tearing it down and building new means paying that cost a second time, plus the cost of hauling away the first. A new building may be cheaper to heat, but by the estimates I have seen it can take decades of lower energy bills to make up for what is spent on demolition and construction.

I will grant the critics their strongest point. Old buildings are expensive to bring up to code. Elevators, sprinklers, modern wiring and ramps do not fit easily into a structure designed for gas lamps and stairs. I have watched owners spend more on renovation than they would have spent on a new building, and I understand why some of them give up.

But a town is not only a balance sheet. When people describe where they live, they do not describe the parking garage. They describe the clock on the bank, the iron storefronts, the depot where their grandparents stepped off the train. Those things cannot be rebuilt once they are gone, because what made them valuable was never the brick. It was the time.

Housing Needs Assessment: Summary of Findings

The city's population grew by 11 percent between 2014 and 2024, while the number of housing units grew by 4 percent. Median rent rose by 38 percent over the same period. The office estimates that the city needs roughly 2,400 additional units over the next ten years to return vacancy rates to a healthy level.

About 18 percent of the city's land lies within one of its three historic districts. These districts are close to downtown, transit and jobs, which makes them among the most suitable places for new housing. They are also where new construction is most difficult. Any project in a historic district must pass design review by the Historic Commission, which considers height, materials and the "compatibility" of a new building with its neighbors. In the period studied, review added a median of five months to the approval of a project in a historic district. Three proposed apartment buildings, totaling about 210 units, were withdrawn by their developers after the commission required them to reduce their height.

The office does not conclude that the historic districts should be eliminated. Several findings complicate that conclusion.

First, rehabilitation has itself produced housing. Since 2014, the conversion of vacant upper floors above downtown storefronts has created 140 apartments, many of them small units that rent below the city median. These conversions were made possible in part by historic tax credits, which are not available for new construction.

Second, the historic districts have the highest property values per acre in the city, and the tax revenue they generate helps pay for services in every neighborhood.

Third, much of the city's vacant or underused land lies outside the historic districts. Surface parking lots alone cover 96 acres within a mile of downtown.

The office recommends that the city (1) keep its historic districts; (2) adopt clear written design standards, so that projects meeting them can be approved without a full hearing; (3) allow taller buildings on the edges of historic districts and on parking lots; and (4) expand incentives for upper-floor conversions.

Q: Why did you choose this building?

A: Honestly, at first because it was cheap. Twenty years ago half the storefronts on this street were empty. The rent on a 1904 building with no air conditioning was about half what the new plaza out by the highway wanted. I figured I would stay a couple of years and move.

Q: And now?

A: Now every storefront is full. There's a bakery, a bookstore, two restaurants, a guitar repair shop. People drive in from other towns on weekends just to walk up and down. My Saturday sales are double my Tuesday sales, and I know a lot of that is the street, not me. Nobody drives forty minutes to walk around a parking lot.

Q: Has the historic designation helped you?

A: It's good and bad. It means the bakery next door can't be torn down for a drive-through, and I like that. But last year the roof needed replacing, and because we're in the district it had to be slate to match the original. That cost my landlord almost three times what asphalt shingles would have, and my rent went up to cover it. The front windows are original too. They're beautiful, and they leak heat all winter. I'm not allowed to replace them with double-paned glass on the street side.

Q: Some people say preservation keeps out new businesses.

A: There's something to that. The rent has climbed right along with the street's popularity. A young person who wants to open a shop the way I did twenty years ago can't afford this street anymore. So the buildings got saved, and some of what made the street interesting is getting priced out. I don't know how you fix that. I'm not sure the rules were ever meant to.

Q: What if your landlord wanted to tear this building down?

A: I'd fight it, no question. But I'd also want the town to help pay for what it's asking us to keep. If the whole town enjoys a handsome street, the whole town ought to share the cost of the slate.

Gentlemen:

I write to urge upon the Board the replacement of the Market Hall, and I ask your patience if I write plainly.

The Hall was raised in 1838, when this town had fewer than six hundred souls and a single street. It was a fine building for its day. It is not a fine building for ours. Its timbers are dry as tinder; its stoves are tended by whoever arrives first on a cold morning; its single stair is so narrow that two men cannot pass upon it. Last winter's fire at Granby, which took eleven buildings and two lives, began in just such a hall. I do not wish to read of our own town in the same columns.

I am told by some of my neighbors that the Hall ought to be kept because their fathers built it, and because the first town meeting was held beneath its roof. I honor the sentiment. But our fathers did not keep the log meeting-house that their own fathers built. They took it down and raised the Hall in its place, and we are the better for their boldness. Every generation must decide what it will hand to the next, and I would rather hand my children a building that will not burn than one that reminds them of men they never knew.

A brick hall of three stories, with iron columns and a slate roof, can be had for a sum the Board's own engineer estimates at eighteen thousand dollars. It would hold the market on the ground floor, offices above, and on the top floor a hall for lectures and concerts such as this town has never had. Rents from the offices would repay a good part of the cost within twenty years. It would stand, I am confident, for a century or more, and it would tell every traveler who steps off the train that this is a town that means to grow.

I do not ask the Board to despise the past. I ask only that it not be ruled by it. The men who built the Hall were building for the future as they saw it. Let us do them the honor of doing the same.

Your obedient servant, Josiah Pell