Nashville Business Journal - by Jenny Burns Staff Writer
Friday, September 18, 2009
A public square with buildings reminscent of Paris. A train shed with a one-of-a-kind gabled roof. A pre-1800 era home on Gallatin Road.
These are pieces of Nashville’s past that have been lost.
But many others have been saved and turned into viable uses for today’s economy: The Hermitage Hotel, Union Station, Werthan Mills, the Bennie Dillon, Third National Bank, downtown lofts and retail spaces along Second Avenue and Broadway.
Behind these projects are developers and architects who used their business acumen and love of all things old to push past the obstacles to save some of Music City’s treasures. They will tell their stories when the National Trust for Historic Preservation holds its annual conference in Nashville in October. They’ll talk of how they used tax credits, saw vision in a pigeon-infested buildings and found creative ways to make a building economically viable today.
The challenges are many.
Foremost, it typically costs 10 percent to 20 percent more to preserve an old property than to build a new one, said Aaron White with Nashville-based Core Development, who transformed the Werthan Mills bag factory on Eighth Avenue into a $35 million condominium community. Core also has converted several downtown buildings into lofts, including the $10 million Kress building, the Art Avenue Lofts, Church Street Lofts and the $9 million Exchange building.
“By the time that you restore it properly, you will have spent more than you would have spent on new construction,” White said.
But that doesn’t always mean a higher sales price. Buyers generally don’t put a premium on a condo restoration, White said. Often, new construction can offer amenities that preserved buildings can’t offer. However, tthere is a segment of buyers that prefers the charm of 100-year-old exposed brick to shiny new buildings.
“You really have to do it because you love it, because buildings are worth saving,” White said. “You have to build a group of socially responsible investors and owners. The reason to do them is not the money.”
It takes specialized craftsmen to customize a layout for a re-use, because in the case of condos, every unit typically is different to fit the building.
“Werthan took a lot more design time. Ultimately the costs are less predictable,” White said.
Developers who specialize in preservation said the booming economy of the past several years helped Nashville save some of its important buildings such as Werthan, the Kress, the Stahlman Building and the old Nashville General Hospital. Today’s rocky environment has made it more difficult to get financing for projects.
Creativity and unconventional thinking also is required when making old spaces new again and usable for today’s lifestyles.
White said many of the best located, most architecturally interesting buildings have been renovated. Most of the remaining buildings downtown are too small to put in lofts large enough to suit buyers and still satisfy city codes.
Many of Nashville’s historic brick structures are being used on the ground floor for retail shops, but few have any use in the top floors. The long, narrow buildings only allow for windows in the front and back, making condos virtually impossible and offering little window frontage to retailers, said architect Ron Gobbell of Gobbell Hays Partners Inc. in Nashville. The spaces also have no room for parking, and some are too small for elevators.
“Key to all of this is finding viable business uses for these properties. We’ve got hundreds of historic structures that are just dying,” he said.
Gobbell was able to make his office building on Fifth Avenue viable by turning the back of the long building into a parking garage. The Kress building did the same, using a “car elevator” to take vehicles to the bottom level of the garage.
Some of the buildings that have been transformed into lofts have cut skylights in the ceilings to let in natural light and create a courtyard atmosphere inside. Lofts on Second Avenue have such a courtyard, as does Homewood Suites, an office building turned hotel on Church Street.
Gobbell points to the “piano building” at 242 Fifth Ave., along with others next to it, as structures in need of saving. Preservation convention goers will tour all floors of the building to see its challenges.
The building is so named because it was at one time a store that sold pianos. Today, the tall, carved building is only being used on the ground floor as a beauty supply store.
“Cities have built entire tourist industries around historic structures,” said Gobbell, pointing to Nashville’s Second Avenue and Broadway districts. “Historic structures do a much better job to create a fabric of the city than a lot of our modern structures do. If they don’t function, it winds up being a surface parking lot. You lose the history, you lose the character, but you also lose the overall fabric of the city.”
The former Third National Bank building sat empty for 10 years after the last tenant moved out in 1986. At one time, a developer was going to demolish the property and build an office tower. Those plans eventually fell through, and Nashville’s first steel skyscraper was saved by a Charleston, S.C., developer. The government’s historic tax credit made it possible, said Gary Everton, architect for the Marriott Courtyard that now fills the space.
Everton points to the hotel’s marble floors, ornate gate doors and limestone features that were there before the building was converted. He said craftsmanship like that can never be recreated in a new building. It’s just too expensive to do today, he said.
“There’s something about that heritage of who we are that makes us feel more grounded and connected. You feel you are part of an ongoing heritage,” Everton said.
That’s why he bought an old church on Fourth Avenue and turned it into his architecture offices. Everton’s office has high ceilings with the exposed beams of the church’s steeple.
Gobbell did the same thing with a building that was a dance school. Both will be featured in the tours during the October convention.
Downtown buildings, Nashville’s urban neighborhoods and the area’s historic plantations will be a laboratory for professionals to gain insight. The conference attendees with go on 37 tours and attend 100 classes on what went right and wrong in Nashville.
Ann Roberts, who served as the director of the Metropolitan Historical Commission for 26 years, has been helping The National Preservation Conference organizers set up tours of Nashville’s icons. Such work reminds her of those that aren’t here to be shown.
A Home Depot now stands on Gallatin Road, where an historic home dating before the 1800s used to be.
Nashville had a courthouse square in 1784 with 19th century buildings that “looked like Paris,” she said. They were demolished in the 1970s.
Roberts wasn’t involved in that battle, but she does remember the fight to save the train shed in the late 1980s. The structure was behind Union Station and had a unique gabled roof. The owners couldn’t pay the taxes on it, and rather than repairing it, they demolished it in 2001 because some trusses were not safe.
The preservation movement has been propelled by the green movement, as more consumers demand buildings not be torn down and materials thrown into land fills. Preservationists hope environmental stewardship, as well as the tourism dollars that historic buildings can draw, will keep these projects viable.
While the pace of preservation has slowed because of wobbly financial markets, it won’t stop, said Bert Mathews, developer of the lofts in the $14.5 million Stahlman and a $5.5 million renovation along Second Avenue.
He’s pushing to get an historic tax credit on the trolley barns that are part of the Rolling Mill Hill development and slated to converted into retail shops.
Others are pressing on, too. White is beginning his next phase of Werthan Mills. And developers of the downtown Hotel Indigo, two former bank buildings on Union Street that are being renovated, will open this fall to guests.
The National Trust for Historic Preservation chose Nashville for its conference four years ago for its preservation ethic in local government, walkability and wealth of historic resources, said Lori Feinman, assistant director for conferences and training for the trust.
She said Nashville’s preservation efforts are successful because of people’s passion for its music heritage and Civil War history — a passion that breeds sustainability.
“Why tear down what’s there? This is the way we can green our cities,” Feinman said.
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