Mercantile Library Association (Boston, Massachusetts)

Transcription

Historic buildings provide something that a new building can't. It provides a history; It provides an energy. Our daily challenge is how do you convince a business to move into an 80-year-old building that needs $175,000 worth of renovation. People need to know that they already have history, and if we don't keep what we've got, you know, nothing's ever gonna be 200 years old if you don't let it get to be 100 years old. [acoustic guitar plays softly] (woman) Production funding for "Old To New: Remodel, Restore, Revitalize" is a provided by a grant from USDA Rural Development and by the members of Prairie Public. (male narrator) For decades, the "downtown" of a community has been the hub of the economic and social lives of rural residents across North Dakota. But today, most downtowns are fighting to remain a vital part of the community. Since their heyday in the 1950's, business districts are shrinking, unable to compete with shopping malls and large entertainment centers. Small towns, and their downtowns, face an uncertain future which is increasingly threatened by shifts in both the economy and population. As a result, some communities find themselves struggling to maintain their vitality and even their sense of identity. (Merlan Paaverud) They built those buildings so that they would last. They would build landmark buildings that would be there forever and so that generations could use them. Now we have some of those buildings left and have the option of reusing them, keeping that history going by using what they gave us to use for our futures. There's an event that occurred there, an individual that was involved there, an important individual in history, or for its architectural features. All of those things can be taken into account when it's put on The National Register. And I think that's the blend that we look for in buildings. Sometimes it's just nice to look at a building and see its beautiful features, the artisans who've worked on the stonework or the windows. All of that is artwork. They took great pride in doing that. It's hard to find that now from handmade materials. (narrator) The Secretary of Interior has established guidelines for preserving historical properties. Some buildings are restored exactly as they were originally constructed and others are adapted for modern use. The most prevalent historic preservation is rehabilitation-- returning a property to a state of utility. The building can either be repaired or altered to make it useable while also preserving features of the property that are significant to its historic, architectural, and cultural values. Our ancestors, our families put everything into these buildings. The built them to last. That was their investment in the future. And so keeping that in mind, we have to look and say well, what can that be used for? Does it have other uses? (narrator) Throughout North Dakota, community groups and entrepreneurs with a vision are rehabilitating old buildings and putting them to new uses. In the process, they are preserving their community's historical and cultural heritage... and its economy. (Merlan Paaverud) It's a struggle, I think, for very many small towns. The money, the funding, is just very, very hard to find. What we hope for is that people will at least say is it possible, is it possible to save this? And I think many of the grassroots efforts that we're seeing now, people there are saying, "Yes." I don't wanna lose that bank building or I don't wanna lose that school or that church or I don't wanna lose our home that I grew up in. I wanna take the time to make sure it works and it happens, but it's that fire and the spirit of people that has to start all of that or else we will lose our buildings. When a building is old and showing its age, that's not the end. It could be the beginning of a new life for that building. (narrator) In 1889, Lisbon was a booming railroad town. In an effort to bring some culture to the community, 2 sisters commissioned the building of a 3-story brick Opera House at a cost of about $20,000. In the early to mid 1900's, the building housed local businesses on the ground level. Music, theatre and graduation events occurred on the 2nd floor. But by the late 1980's, the building sat vacant and boarded up along the city's main street. Today a group of local volunteers are working to bring back the Opera House's grandeur and its role in the community as a civic and cultural center. (Dick Larson) When Penney's closed their doors in 1988, the building stood empty for about 5 years. It detracted from the downtown to have a vacant building. The ground floor had big, plate glass windows that were empty, and you could see into an empty building. The upstairs was boarded up. It looked, was pretty shabby. Attempts were made to contact the owner about doing something with the building. He decided he wasn't gonna sell it. He was gonna give it away to a nonprofit organization. And in 1993, the Lisbon Opera House Foundation was formed, and in 1994, they actually got ownership of the building. The 3 people on the first board of directors raised money and got a grant from the government, and they used that for an architectural study and found out that the building was structurally in very good shape. In fact, they said if anything, it was overdesigned. So that's one thing that made it feasible to restore it. There was damage. It needed a lot of work. It needed new windows. The plaster is deteriorating in places from the effects of heating and cooling. It gets pretty hot up here in the summertime, and it gets pretty cold up here in the wintertime. So until we get a reliable heating system, the plaster will have to stay the way it is. The highlight of the Opera House-- twice a year we have a local group called the "No Name Players" that put on stage productions. Our performance season is limited by the temperatures up here. I'm one of the original "No Name Players." I got hooked on this from the very first play. It's always what's been done here over the years. It's a special part of history. It's like going back in time, and I can just imagine what it must have been like in the very beginning with the actors out there doing their performing and their horses and buggies probably outside. (Dick Larson) It's an expensive proposition. We understand that one group tried to restore the building back in the '70's and '80's, and they were talking about it was gonna cost $400,000 which was kind of a daunting figure to think about. Well, today, we already have that much into the building just in the elevator, the stairway reconstruction, the windows, the front facade, redoing the ground floor for tenants. We've put a lot of money into it, and there's still probably another $600,000, $800,000 that needs to be put into here to get it to the condition that we want it. Well, we found out our key to getting financial aid is to demonstrate community support, and we have done that with the "No Name Players," with other fundraisers we've done. We've got the community behind us, and that in turn stimulates other agencies, other businesses to contribute. We early on discovered that we need to change our terminology. We talked about restoring the building, and according to The National Register of Historic Places, when you restore something, you put it back the way it originally was. Well, we are not doing that because we want this building to be self-supporting. It needs to be a functional building. It's not going to be a museum. People are getting more appreciative of the old buildings. We had people early on who said why are you putting all that money into that building? Why don't you just tear it down and put up a steel building? It'd be a lot less expensive, but a steel building, even if it could be done less expensive, wouldn't have the character, and I think people are starting to recognize that and appreciate that more than they did. (narrator) Like many small towns in North Dakota in the early 1900's, homesteaders established Bowman to support the railroad industry. Today, community efforts, along with financial resources from ranching and the oil industry, have helped Bowman's main street not only stay alive, but thrive. Most small communities seem to be having to keep getting smaller where it seems like where we're sitting far enough away, you know, from the bigger cities and stuff that our numbers do get to grow. People have the mentality around Bowman and the surrounding area, you know, we want to keep us here. We don't have to want to send our kids off and not be able to have jobs, good paying jobs, for them to come back. So people's mentality is keep your business in Bowman as much as you can, and we just do that. We work together, and everybody helps one another out. You go up and down Main Street, you have very few spaces where it's-- you're able to get in with the business. You have to either buy something out or build. There's a bank on the corner. It says 1908. That was one of the first banks built in the town of Bowman. And I believe there are one of 2 original buildings on Main Street. The library is in a renovated grocery store. So yeah, I think people are starting to think more along those lines in terms of preserving the original buildings or older buildings. (narrator) From turning a grocery store into a library, a bank into a business office, and a lumberyard into a museum, community leaders are striving to preserve their history while forging their future. Today tourists, researchers, and educators are drawn to Bowman and its rich history and natural resources. (Colleen Kelley) People from all over the world come here. A lot of it has to do with our paleontology department. The paleontology will be an excellent foundation for the beginnings of the museum. In 1998, a group of women, the Federated Women's Club, decided that they would like to have a museum in town, and they formed the Bowman County Historical and Genealogical Society with the idea of forming a museum. And we were looking for a building. We priced out whether we should build or what we should do. The people that owned the lumberyard offered us the block and the buildings there. We took everything out except the basic structure, and the volunteers built all of the exhibit walls that are in it. And we have an additional building to the east of the one that the museum is in which we are planning for new exhibits in that. We'll connect the 2 buildings, and hopefully in the next 10 years, we'll have them both full. (narrator) On the edge of The Badlands in northwestern North Dakota, sits the community of Watford City. Established in 1914, it was built at the end of the railroad line. Today, tourism and economic development efforts are working together to preserve the community's past and ensure a prosperous future. City leaders preserved the buildings they could but also kept their history in mind while building new ones. Watford City, like many communities, is using incentive tax programs such as renaissance zones to help revitalize its downtown. When we were lookin' at a renaissance zone project on Main Street, we had to determine what buildings had some potential to be renovated, and most of them were built on 24-inch centers on 2 x 4 walls and wood structures that were very hazardous in terms of the fire danger. So we just removed the ones we could to Heritage Park where people could come and get a slice of what life was like during that period of time. The renaissance zone is a state program that gives tax credits for renovations, but we are a low-tax community. So tax incentives in a town like Watford City might be between $500 and $1000 a year, so we have a 1% city sales tax that if a project meets the criteria, we'll invest up to 25% of a project for renovation, and I think we have 16 retail and service businesses that have utilized that. First International Bank had made an extreme commitment to keeping their corporate offices in our community, and you see that $6 1/2 million expansion we have down there. Basically, it was a huge piece for us, and we had to do a lot of work to actually move businesses to allow them to expand, and that's kind of the anchor for all the things we're doing right now. We decided as we were doing this large edition to add a main street restaurant to Watford City and bring a movie theater back. We lost our movie theater 20 years ago, and my husband and I have always loved going to movies, and we love going out to eat. We wanted to get people back to having an enjoyable evening out. As we discovered as we started peeling off the ceiling of these old buildings, we found a beautiful decorative tin ceiling so we kept that, kept it in our shop, and when we were ready to start putting it in, had it painted, painted about 5 times over, put the original ceiling in, which gives it a little bumpy look to it because it's old tin, and it's kind of neat. Well, because we're located by the Badlands with Theodore Roosevelt National Park close by, we wanted to bring the look of the outside back in again using real wood, timberlodge beams, the real rock which we received out of Montana, a quarried floor that would adapt easily to the Watford City, North Dakota climate. So we're trying to bring the outside into the building. When you're young, it's not as much about the history as it is have your buildings a reflection of the community, and that didn't happen 75 years ago. You know, they just put up a building to put it up. But today when the buildings we're building now are reflective of--the architecture looks like the Badlands. It looks like the junipers and the sage and all those things. Your buildings shouldn't be abusive to the eye, and so our Main Street we hope that it reflects a retail sector that's warm and friendly, and so that they'll become the historic buildings of the future. The only building we have empty right now is a historical building that we'd like to do something with, and there sits our daily challenge is, how do you convince a business to move into an 80-year-old building that needs $175,000 worth of renovation. To get somebody to go in and put that kind of money into a building, they have to have a love for the history. We'll provide incentives. We'll provide the incentives to renovate the thing and get a business in there because we find that empty buildings lose their value instantly. (narrator) As towns were established across the northern plains, schools dotted the prairie landscape. But as the population dwindled, schools consolidated. And that left some empty school buildings. Just to the west of Watford City in Arnegard, Milt Hanson returned to his hometown to turn an old empty school building into a bed and breakfast and to preserve its history. I grew up in Arnegard. Dad was an elevator manager here. I graduated from Watford City, and I spent a lot of time in the school as a kid, played a lot of basketball and things kids do in small towns. I took possession of the school in March of '98. I was living in Columbia, South Carolina at the time. Came home for Christmas, and I said that'd make a great bed and breakfast. I had actually been lookin' for homes in South Carolina where I was livin' at the time to buy and renovate and just couldn't find anything that was worth the amount of money it was gonna take to renovate it. So I approached a person who belonged to a group called "The Friends and Alumni of the Old School." It's a group that actually preserved the school. The school had actually been slated for destruction a number of times because it was an empty building. They liked that idea. They had other people talkin' to 'em in the past, but they wanted somethin' that emphasized the school, but she did say we have some stipulations. That's fine, and what are those? She said first of all, you can't turn the building into a bar. You can't destroy the building unless it becomes unusable due to a tornado or something like that. You have to maintain the exterior of the building, and then last was, I have to keep it available for guests, for people to come and see. The community really appreciates I think that I've saved the building. This building had I not taken over, or anybody taken over, was probably 5 to 10 years away from falling down. One of the challenges I did have with the people in town was this is farm country and oil country, and to do something like a bed and breakfast is very out of their comfort area. It's just amazing what he's done and his decisions that he made to where to put the walls, how he wanted to change the rooms, and it was a big undertaking and not necessarily encouraged by the community at the beginning. [laughs] He's had a lot of dissenters, so to speak, but a lot of people that are also on his side and have been extremely supportive, so that's also been very good. And that's a good thing because he's made a success of it, and people have been able to say wow, it worked out for you. You made a good decision. (Milt Hanson) Actually, some of those detractors became my biggest supporters. I would always tell them here's what I'm doin'. You're welcome to come through anytime to see what I'm doing, and once they saw that I was serious, that I wasn't gonna be here just for a couple years and quit and give up, they really became strong supporters. Most of the renovations actually were cosmetics and mechanical. Every exterior wall in the building has a new wall built inside of it just for insulation purposes so my walls now are probably 16, 17 inches thick. It's all new wiring, all new plumbing. The original plumbing in here was galvanized pipe. I figure I have over a mile of new wire pulled in here and almost a mile of new copper. I did put an $85,000 roof on the building. That is one thing that I actually hired out. You know, I did a lot of this work myself. I just did a room or a task at a time. I never dwelled on the big picture. Something like this, especially doing it myself, can be a little overwhelming because it was a 5 1/2-year renovation process I did. The major renovation is done, especially in the living areas. The 2 gyms are the next renovation project. What we call "the little gym" which was built in 1936, has a stage on it. That gym is acoustically wonderful, and eventually I'm going to turn it into a cultural area. I'll be able to do dinner theaters and concerts and receptions and dances and things like that. The big gym, which was built in 1954, which is the newest section of the building-- I use that for rental purposes, and so I've had auction sales, and I have craft shows. I've had dog obedience training. My marketing is almost exclusively Internet. My clientele is worldwide clientele. It's a neat place to stay, and I've been to several bed and breakfasts, but each one is so, so unique. There's lots to see and do in this part of the country, but you have to drive. And I'm a museum nut, and this is the kind of school that a lot of these little towns had. (Milt Hanson) It's an interesting bed and breakfast because it's such a large building. There are a lot of schools, the old country schools that have been renovated, but they have a full-size big building. This building's 25,000 square feet, and that's a pretty big house. (narrator) Settled in 1904 as a commerce center to serve homesteaders from Scandinavia, the community of Crosby is now home to SEO Precision. A few years ago, with support from the community, Shawn and Esther Oehlke began their high-tech entrepreneurial business in Crosby. SEO Precision designs and builds electro-optical fast-steering mirror technology for government and commercial uses. SEO Precision, based in Crosby, is reaching a global market from an historic building. This building was pretty pivotal. Different ones in the community feel it's quite keystone type of location and opportunity and wanted to see it functioning again, and we certainly wanted to take them up on the challenge. This building was constructed in 1917, originally as a mercantile store. Mr. Ingwalson was the original builder and owner. JC Penney has been a primary occupant up until the mid 1980's, and since then it was virtually empty. There were a few attempted projects to utilize the building. We came up in 2004 and were able to renovate the main floor with the assistance of the community and have turned it really into a multiuse facility. The top floor, we have apartments. We have 8 apartments and one guest room which is basically a hotel room. The main floor we have office space for SEO Precision. We have the Divide County Tech Center run by Burnell Rosenquist and sponsored by the Divide County Jobs Development Authority. We have a coffee shop run very expertly by Heike Rosenquist. We also have Rosenbaugh Ink which is a combined business of both Burnell's and Heike's. We have available cubicle space for rent. In the basement, we have 2 labs. We have an electronics lab and a clean room optical lab, and that's for SEO Precision. The remainder of the basement is largely unfinished, and we've got ideas for that. I think we were able to do this pretty economically overall. That's what we were looking for because we came at this from a very, very basic bootstrapped program, and frankly, for the high technology we do, we've done it all on very minimal dollars, mostly was cleaning. We had a lot of cleaning we had to do because there was about 100 years of coal dust that was down in the basement. (narrator) In an effort to spur high-tech economic development, Senators Kent Conrad and Byron Dorgan have helped SEO Precision connect with large contractors and federal agencies. (Shawn Oehlke) That's been a huge, huge help for SEO because a lot of our work is more on a federal level and a national level and even an international level which from our perspective politically, the influences has to be more from the U.S. Senators than from the State Senators, from our state-level government. We get quite a bit of support from individuals in Crosby, but as far as the town fathers, whatever you want to call 'em, that power base, they're still very reserved and have reserved their judgement at this point with SEO, and they're waiting to see what we do. The whole culture with agriculture is very, very different from high technology in the way that things are done and how you look at things so there have been hurdles to overcome, and we're still overcoming some, but we're here to stay, and we'll work those out, and we'll make things succeed. And what we plan to do from my perspective-- I'm in the design area, and this is where the design work will be done as we move forward with other products, And we will be looking to pay national standards, not North Dakota state standard wages, which are significantly higher, and start bringing in a different culture into Crosby as well. And I think that's one of the things that is the reservation of some of the people in town is they want to see business, they want to see people being hired, but bringing in another culture and a whole nother way of thinking kind of scares them. (narrator) In the early 1900s, the San Haven Tuberculosis Sanitarium near Dunseith began operation, housing and isolating TB patients. By the 1900s, the facility was turned into a state school for the mentally handicapped. But in 1987, a federal judge ordered that the patients be moved into community environments forcing the closure of San Haven. Hundreds of people lost their job, and an architectural treasure stood empty. (Bill Patrie) "San Haven," a safe place. It was beautiful, tall, towering pine trees. They had their own post office on campus. All of a sudden, 400 and some people lost their jobs. And that old building designed as a hospital suddenly became vacant. And Governor Sinner asked me as the economic development director for the state to come up with a reuse plan, and what an education that was. And we formed the San Haven Redevelopment Corporation. We started looking at alternate uses of the building itself, and eventually we gave up. We said our job is to create 400 jobs to replace the 400 jobs that were lost. What's the best way to do that? And if the building fits into that scheme, fine. And if it doesn't, too bad, and it didn't. I'd have loved to preserve it just because it was pure beauty. We did run an ad in "The Wall Street Journal" and got some interesting responses, but early on, I say we were into it 6 months and realized this isn't where the future of jobs are in this area. We did convert it initially to a sewing factory, took out the walls to make a factorylike setting. Now it's vacant, and it's a nightmare to drive around in. I mean, it's sad to see. But around San Haven in Dunseith and Rolla and Rollette, more than 400 new jobs have been created. Now, Dunseith is a spectacular little town, and they had some progressive leadership and still do. And they worked with Turtle Mountain Corporation and expanded that. Turtle Mountain Manufacturing which is tribally owned. They worked with that, and they saved all those 400 jobs. And San Haven gave impetus to that. So the lesson from San Haven is, you can do all kinds of things. You can start companies from scratch. You can expand existing companies. You're not defeated. You know, you can do some stuff to offset the loss of jobs. Economic growth is not a defensive strategy. It's not fear-based strategy. It's not desperation. It requires good, positive, and honest intellectual work, and San Haven is a good example of that. (narrator) In 1881, Grand Forks was established. Business boomed. But in the 1800s and 1900s, Grand Fork's downtown was facing the same dilemma other cities in the nation faced-- housing, schools, and businesses moved to the perimeters. The community focus turned away from its downtown. In 1997, a historic flood and fire ravaged Grand Forks causing millions of dollars in damage. Downtown was not spared. Since the flood, the city council has approved millions for housing and business rehabilitation programs. Historic buildings were evaluated for their potential to be salvaged and preserved. Some were lost, but many were saved. With the flood, a great deal of federal money came into Grand Forks, and it mandates, in fact, when the Corps or any other federal agency is doing a project, they have to pay attention to what's historic, and they have to try to mitigate any harm to it. In Grand Forks, it was primarily the floodwall. So we have a $400 million flood wall, and 2% of that budget was allocated or earmarked to help us preserve our historic properties so that they wouldn't be harmed by the floodwall or given that they were harmed, to do the least amount of harm possible. We lost a lot of buildings downtown, and as mitigation for those buildings, we were able to assist the ones that we have left to rebuild a more historic storefront, to rebuild what they had, if it was historic, to make what had been changed in the '50's and '60's and '70's be more appropriate to the time period of the rest of the facade. You know, you drive down any downtown street anywhere, and you see a lot of stores where the first level, the shopping level, has been changed with the times. And that's typical. Now the sense is well, let's go back to what the rest of the building looks like. Let's go back to the big windows the way it was in the old days. When the City Center Mall came down, it opened a whole block of buildings on both sides of the street that we were able to rehab so that the storefronts are attractive and historicay fairly accurate. That enabled us to have a downtown district. As we get away from the flood, we're moving more and more into education and helping people see what gems they have, and that's what you need to do. They have to appreciate what they've got in order to want to retain it. There's a tendency to think that North Dakota, as a whole, and Grand Forks for us, doesn't have any history. It's just not true. We have a lot of history. We have a lot of housing stock that's beautiful and impressive, and we have a wonderful old city center that cerainly has been improved even since the flood. And people need to know that they already have history, and if we don't keep what we've got, you know, nothing's ever gonna be 200 years old if you don't let it get to be 100 years old. (narrator) Through a partnership between the city of Grand Forks, the Historic Preservation Commission, JLG Architects, and the building's owners, the Metropolitan Opera House was saved. (Lonnie Laffen) The historic Metropolitan Opera House in Grand Forks was the finest opera house between Minneapolis and Seattle when it was built. It housed, Broadway plays came out here. They came in right on this railroad track. Sometime in the '40's, it became a bowling alley as opera, theater waned and bowling became popular. The building kind of deteriorated over the years until the flood put it completely out of commission. So we started behind the scenes just working with the city and eventually were able to put together a deal to purchase it and renovate it. Well, the outside was in tough shape when we took ahold of this building. All of the storefront had been reduced to pieces of glass block and different aluminum systems. All the windows were shot. The entire area above the roof line was gone. All of the bay windows were gone, so everything you see that's maroon, the maroon wood trim-- all of the cornices, all of that is new. It was about a million dollar restoration project just on the exterior to get it back to its original condition. It's completely finished with the exception of a small storefront commercial area that makes up maybe 5% of the space. There's 21 very nice high-end apartments that occupy almost all of the building, and we're still looking for that last little piece of the commercial storefront. Most architecture firms just do design work. We've actually bought 4 old historic buildings-- renovated them, owned them, developed them, designed them-- the whole thing. You know, the construction of restoring them, that's something we do everyday, and for us, that's pretty easy. The challenging part is in the finances. They're almost as expensive to do as a brand-new building, sometimes even more, so it's difficult to make that work. When we preserve a building, we follow the National Park Service's Standards for Rehabilitation, and basically you're putting it back exactly the way it was designed, and that's always our goal when we rehabilitate a building on the exterior. The interior has to work. It has to be, have the right plumbing and all of those things to be a new functioning contemporary building. In our smaller North Dakota towns, people do not appreciate old, historic brick buildings. Anything new seems to be better. Even sometimes a small, metal shed is better than a big old brick building, and financially that makes sense, but historically and preservation of our small towns, we have to keep restoring these old buildings. (narrator) According to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, dollar-for-dollar, historic preservation is one of the highest job-generating economic development options. And yet, individuals and organizations often struggle to find financing from government grants, fundraisers, or bankers. In Hillsboro, an active community group is making progress in rehabbing 2 historic buildings on the city's main street, while also changing minds. This is so integral to our community. It sits on the historic Caledonia Avenue and Main Street, and the history here is so much Hillsboro that if this were destroyed and knocked away, it would be irreaceable history to this community and a big hole on our Main Street. The ildings that we are focusing on right now are a group of buildings, 4 buildings, that were built together by 4 independent businessmen in 1893. It's called the "Union Block." Currently there are 2 businesses occupying 2 of those portions, and the other 2 have been in a state of deterioration over a period of time, so those are the ones we're concentrating on now. At the time we were looking to save the building, we did circulate a petition over Memorial Day of 2005, and we received 500 signatures from the general public. Many of those 500 have been, since that time, very supportive verbally and financially. (Don Foss) I think I gave them some pretty realistic advice up front. You know, I told them the difficulties there are for an organization that's basically a volunteer organization, the realities of what they're trying to do in small town North Dakota and the difficulties to obtain financing on a project where a building isn't an asset anymore, where's it's probably a liability. And the great thing about this group of people is, they overcame any of the negative things that I threw at 'em, and they convinced me and made me a believer that the energy is here, and their passion is here, that this can become reality and be saved. They definitely have made a believer out of me. (narrator) Like many small town rehabilitation projects, after years of neglect and vacancy, 2 of the Union Block buildings were deteriorating. Severe water damage has rotted away the 2nd floor and the back of one building. (Bruce Person) Our goal is to get the building stabilized. We will not own it on a permanent basis. We will in turn sell it to somebody, another business or organization, that has visions of what they want in the building. We want to make sure that we get the structure repaired so that the structure itself is stabilized, and we don't have to worry about it for another 50 years. Our plan setup in the 4 phases is, the first phase we did complete which was to stabilize the flooring, and then our next phase which we are currently working on is to stabilize the roofing and put new roofing on it. The next phase will be to remove the damaged material from the interior of the building and clean it out as much as we can, and then the last phase will be putting iwindows and doors on the exterior to make it ready for the next tenant. We will also in this phase replace plumbing and electrical. Our initial expenses for the first year-- we raised the money through just the individuals in our smaller organization, and the 2nd year our budget was about $60,000 for repair of the back wall and the flooring on the Johnson store. We raised that money through individual contributions from the community members and the outlying area, and we did receive grant mey from several organizations. When we have buildings such as these that are masonry brick, they've stood for 100 years, over 100 years, so we feel that they could stand for another 100 years if we can just put out a little effort. It carries a lot of memories, but it also carries hope for our future and to try to maintain the vitality in our town so that we project the image that we are not willing to sit back and let things deteriorate and dwindle. We want to be proactive and promote businesses in Hillsboro. We have 2 businesses in one of the buildings, and we have had 2 other requests for space in the building that is not ready for occupancy yet, so we firmly believe that it will be occupied when we finish it. (narrator) Despite the challenges, developers and business owners throughout the state are stepping up to the challenge, rehabbing old buildings to invest in the future of their community. In Jamestown, several such projects have taken place. Developers are trying to create an inviting downtown that draws residents and tourists to the area. (Barbara Lang) We still have quite a few buildings on the main streets of Jamestown that are original. There's been some calamities. We had a fire in one of the biggest, largest buildings on what we call "the corner of Main and Main" which is the primary intersection of the downtown core, and that right now is empty, but there's word that the Art Center is going to do a park and performing arts outdoors space there. The Zapa Building which is now the Buffalo City Grill has recently been rehabbed. Also across the street from that is the Old James River National Bank Building which is now a Babb's Coffee House. That has brought a real spark of life to downtown Jamestown. (Charlie Kourajain) Right now we've really had a shot in the arm. A few of our empty buildings have been occupied now and revitalized and rejuvenated, renovated, and those are signs that people are seeing some opportunities here in town that they want to take advantage of. What they've done is, taken buildings that have sat vacant for a number of years. The one was vacant for over 20 years and the other one for over 5 years and put those buildings back in use and spent a lot of money and spent a lot of time, a lot of energy to do that, and it certainly is a boon to downtown. It's kind of brought smiles back into the faces, and we hope it will encourage other people to follow suit. We've been restoring the entire downtown, what is called the Brass Rail and Lill's Cafe, The Continental Lounge and Lill's Restaurant, and it's 55,000 square feet of commercial downtown and economically very viable. On the south side of the building is really an institution called the "Brass Rail." We've upgraded and remodeled that portion already. But then we're gonna create the new Continental Bistro. So we're gonna do the same food that people have come to love with Lill Dixon. Jamestown needs an Italian restaurant so we are gonna rebrand the Continental Bistro, and we're gonna do Italian. We're going to be an Italian restaurant. And the reason we're picking that change is to totally compliment the other developers in Jamestown that have come in downtown. The rest of the space will be commercial. We're looking at making it office and specialty retail because Jamestown is also short, if you think about it, on about a 1000- to 2000-square foot nitch specialty retail space. And then we own the other buildings on the block that have already been redeveloped. So we really believe that downtown Jamestown is a result of the 3 developers, the Babb's Coffee people, the Lundeens, and the Marcil Group are really creating some development opportunity down in that corner. We'd like to make Jamestown a tourist destination off the highway kind of place. (narrator) A few blocks from downtown Jamestown, sits an old public school building turned technology center. In 2001, Chris and Roy Sheppard wanted to expand their business space and by chance found the Franklin School Building fit their needs. Today the CSI Technology Center houses the local cable and television company, a learning center and a computer networking business. When time came to consider moving our facilities because we were running out of space and growing. It was also about the time this building was standing empty. It's the CSI Technology Center at Franklin School. It was started in 1909, completed in 1910. The architect was a gentleman by the name of Dreamers out of Grand Forks. It closed due to declining enrollment, and it had to do, I think, with they like elementary kids now, I believe, all on the same floor. I was not as involved on a daily basis as my brother and sister-in-law, but being the person who is closest to historic preservation issues, I worked from that point of view and worked closely with the architects to make sure we were doing things that met with the Secretary of Interior Standards of Rehabilitation. You feel like you're walking into an old school, and we've tried to be true to that. We've taken our technology and have hidden as much of it as we can although we do have TV sets and computers and that sitting out in the public area, but a lot of the other items are hidden away. I believe you can renovate a building for the same price, or fairly close to the same price as new construction. We were ready to build a new building. If we were gonna build a new building, we'd put in all new electrical and all new mechanical in that new building. So in the renovation, we were doing the same things so the only element we added was, we had a little bit of demolition that we had to do. Probably the biggest challenge was putting the elevator into an existing building that was not designed for an elevator. We had to drill a 60-foot deep hole in the basement. It is like any brand-new building except it's a lot cooler and has 11-foot ceilings and creaky floors that you can't hear my knees creak when I walk up and down the stairs! There are 10 main classrooms. Two of them were subdivided into smaller offices, but the walls were all temporary walls built right over the blackboards. You could remove the walls and take it back to a full classroom size if you so needed to and in trying to preserve as much of it as possible. There was not any carving anywhere on any wall. There was no gum. There was beautiful woodwork that had been basically untouched. It had been varnished, and that was all. Now, the floors had been covered with vinyl and carpeting, and when that was torn up, of course, we needed to refinish the floors. But the rest of the woodwork in this building we did not touch; we dusted. My daughter actually went to kindergarten here, and I can remember the first day that she came as a tiny, little kindergarten student standing in front of the huge stairway, the outside stairway, that goes into the school. You walk in, and there's another set of maple stairs, and then there's this beautiful grand staircase that goes up on either side to a beautiful balcony above. It's a magnificent building. This historic building provides something that a new building can't. It provides a history. It provides an energy that you can't get in a new building unless the new building becomes older. There's spirits here. You know, there are people who went to school here. Lou L'Amour went to school here. A lot of the times you can feel the essence of these hundreds and thousands of students who went to school here. And we wanted the community to be able to come back and say this was my school. We have a composition book that we use as our guestbook, and if you went to school here, you get a gold star. If you had a child who went to school here, you get a red star. If you're a parent or grandparent you get a silver star. And so we want people to get their stars. Anytime during the day, people can come walk through. We are pleased that they do because it means that we've done something that's important to them, and that was important to us. (narrator) Around North Dakota, some developers are looking to old buildings rather than new construction. A few years ago, Mike Marcil moved back to North Dakota seeing opportunities. The Marcil Group focuses on projects in rural communities where old buildings can become new housing. (Mike Marcil) People want to live in rural towns. The big problem that they have in rural towns is they don't have new housing. So what we do is, we look for really viable buildings that we can redevelop into modern housing so we can bring those families affordably back to those communities. The ideal building is something I can easily restore without doing a tremendous amount of foundation work, a tremendous amount of structural work. And unfortunately, it has to be in a viable community. There are some communities that no matter how I wanna go in there and save the hospital, you know, and convert the hospital to a condo complex, it's not economically viable to do that. Anything can be fixed, built, constructed, redeveloped, but it's how much and how much time. And then how much can you recover as a developer to do those things? We're able to, probably differently than most of the local investors, we're able to tap different capital pools so we can buy a building for cash. We can put the dollars into renovating it, get the building stabilized, get it rented, get the income producing, and then go to the banks. Occasionally when appropriate, we'll get a, maybe a property tax exemption through a renaissance project. To date, we haven't used public money. Occasionally, we'll get some assistance in terms of, I think favorable assessments maybe,I guess would probably be the best way to put it in some of our towns that don't have renaissance. We're puttin' our own money into 'em. We're risking our own credit. I mean, I'm on the bank loans, personally, and it's really a make-it- or-break-it deal. To a certain extent, our ability to create some differentiation as a developer, as a community patron, as a contributor to the state and to the community, having some projects that really are kind of beyond the profit motive but really into the community motive. Actually, it makes us a lot more money in the end because what it allows us to do is open up other opportunities for us. So, we kind of look at the historic renovations as a way to give back, but then also to open up other opportunities and doors for us. North Dakota is a viable place. You know, our rural and our historic buildings are of significance and importance to us in whatever community they're in, small or big, we should be looking at preserving these assets. (narrator) An economic developer in North Dakota, Bill Patrie has learned firsthand the challenges and opportunities, individuals, organizations, and state government can face when trying to reuse a building. From a development point of view, you look for anchor buildings or signature buildings, buildings that will personify the community, what are they, and there's lots of buildings that don't contribute to that. They're just old. The point in my mind has 2 parts. One is, the structure itself needs to have integrity and utility. It has to be worth something. It can be used for something. So apart from that, nothing matters. I mean, if it's just old but can't be used for something, if it's too small or too antiquated or too dangerous, it has no value. I believe that the history of the building is in part in the value of the building and is determined in part by what the people believe the future of the community is. I don't really believe in preservation for preservation sake nor do I believe in research for research sake. You always intend to apply it. So what does the history of the building contribute to the future of the building? That's it has utility, that's what you need to understand. And how does that integrate into the community and the future of the community? You're building on something. What is that? A lot of things work in a growing community, and historic preservation works best in a growing community. A lot of things don't work in a dying community, and historic preservation is very hard to do in a dying community. Historic preservation is a function of something else, adaptive reuse, and to make historic preservation work in adaptive reuse, there must be a reuse. Nobody will sink money into a building that's just gonna sit there idle. These historic buildings are irreplaceable. Buildings like this will never be built again, just rarely, because they're cost prohibitive, so they are treasures that we'll never see again. You can do a lot of damage to an historic building if you just sort of throw things up. You really have to care about the building as a thing and not just say oh well, I wanna move into this historic building 'cause it's got great ceilings. You have to say I wanna move into this historic building because it's a great building that happens to have a terrific ceiling. You can turn a downtown that's unique and speaks to the history of that town into a destination point just because it exists. And when it doesn't exist, you lose your history. You lose the common sense of people growing together and building this community. We have a very short culture history in the Midwest. You know, most of this was developed after the 1880's. Your culture is defined by your architecture and your art. So what are we gonna build as a lasting legacy that's gonna be here 200, 300 years from now for our future generations to enjoy and to say, look, wow, that's really cool? My advice to any community is, what do you want for your community? Work for those things based on what you got. Don't try and look like Bismarck or Fargo or somebody else. Don't do the stuff they're doing and pay all those costs. That makes no sense. Stay local. Pay attention locally. Historic preservation, how does that fit into it? That's your asset. You got it. Build on it. Use it. It's yours-- don't defend it-- use it! (woman) To order a DVD of this program, "Old to New: Remodel, Restore, Revitalize" call... or order online at Prairie Public's Web site www.prairiepublic.org. Production funding for "Old to New: Remodel, Restore, Revitalize" is provided by a grant from USDA Rural Development and by the members of Prairie Public.