An on-line news journal about the Preservation of
Vermont’s Historic Architecture and Landscape
Number 2, March 2001
Published by the Preservation Trust of Vermont, 104 Church Street,
Burlington, VT 05401(802) 658-6647
http://www.ptvermont.org
For more information, to subscribe or to unsubscribe to the
email version, or to submit something for publication please
contact Meg Campbell, Editor. "mail
to:meg@ptvermont.org"
UPCOMING EVENTS
Annual Preservation Conference
Richard Moe, President of the National Trust, has agreed to
give the keynote address at the annual preservation conference
entitled “Preservation Tools: The Cutting Edge” on May
11th on Brattleboro. If you would like a room at the Latchis Hotel
please call 254-6300 and ask for the conference rate.
Workshop Notice
The Vermont Forum on Sprawl has recently published a
handbook as part of its Way to Grow series of community planning
tools. The handbook - Growing Smarter: Best Site Planning for
Residential, Commercial & Industrial Development specific,
practical examples and techniques for applying smart growth
principles to the siting, design and layout of development
projects. It also provides information on how to make the
regulatory review process faster, easier and more predictable for
projects which incorporate best development practices.
Workshops will be hosted by the Vermont Forum on Sprawl,
the Chittenden County Regional Planning Commission, and the
Champlain Initiative in various locations around Chittenden
County to train volunteer and professional planners, developers,
landscape architects, municipal officials, interested citizens,
etc. The workshop dates and locations are listed below. All
workshops will be from 7:00 PM - 9:00 PM and
will include refreshments.
May 2: Essex Town Hall, 81 Main Street
May 8: Hinesburg Town Hall, VT Route 116
May 14: Milton Town Hall, 43 Bombardier Road
May 23: Burlington, Fletcher Free Library, 235 College Street
The workshops will be conducted by landscape architect Julie
Campoli and land use consultant Dana Farley. The
workshops are free of charge and all participants will be provided
with a copy of the handbook.
Anyone wishing to attend a workshop should notify Dana Farley at
425-2124 or
The Brattleboro Arts Initiative and the
Preservation Trust of Vermont hope to buy the Latchis Hotel from
Spero and Elizabeth Latchis for $1.4 million. The 1938 Art Deco
building includes three theaters as well as a hotel, restaurant
and brew pub. BAI and PTV believe this is a once-in-a-lifetime
opportunity for Brattleboro to acquire the theaters for use as a
movie and performing arts complex.
Bristol, Bristol Downtown Building
Keep your eyes on the Italianate, three-story, clapboard
building on the south side of Main Street at east end of Bristol’s
downtown. Jeffrey Glassberg and Amy Johnston have been working on
a project to create limited liability corporation with 17 local
investors to rehabilitate this commercial and residential
building. Work is already underway.
Colchester, Spaulding Bay Schoolhouse
In process of demolishing a camp last summer, property owners
in Colchester discovered a log cabin that further investigation
revealed was likely the c.1800 Spaulding Bay Schoolhouse. The
building was in the process of being dismantled and sold out of
the community by a historic building broker, Scott Morrison. Town
officials and PTV have been working together to keep this
building, a well-preserved and rare example of precise log cabin
construction, in the community. The schoolhouse has since been
temporarily moved to behind the town offices while the community
forms plans for its siting, rehabilitation, and future uses.
East Burke, Fairbanks Museum-Mt. View Creamery Barn Restoration
With help from a Vermont Division for Historic Preservation
barn grant and PTV Preservation Grant, this threshing barn at
Mountain View Creamery is being rehabbed for an agri-tourism
interpretive center that will direct visitors to various farms in
the region open for visitors.
Richmond, Monitor Barns
The Monitor Barns project began in earnest this early winter
with the dismantling of the "West Monitor Barn". This
barn was in extraordinarily poor shape with extensive rotting of
the interior framing system and extensive deterioration of the
roof. The contractor hired to do the restoration work, Jan
Lewandoski of Restoration and Traditional Building, dismantled the
structure from the top down using cranes due to the dangerous
condition of the interior. Large sections of the barn were removed
and completely dismantled on the ground, the salvageable parts
then stored for reconstruction in the spring and summer of 2001.
The plan is to have the foundation competed by mid-June and the
frame reassembled by December.
Vergennes Becomes State’s Thirteenth Designated Downtown
Montpelier - The Vermont Downtown Development Board voted on
February 26 to award downtown designation to Vergennes under the
1998 Downtown Development Act.
Molly Lambert, Chair of the Downtown Development Board and
Secretary of the Agency of Commerce and Community Development
recognized Vergennes’s efforts, saying, “We are really pleased
to be able to recognize the energy and commitment of this
community. The Vergennes Partnership, the City, and many others
have completed a number of major projects in the downtown, and the
difference is striking. As a result of their vision, downtown is
once again becoming a source of great pride to the community.”
In order to obtain downtown designation, a community must
demonstrate a lasting commitment to revitalization through
planning, capital improvements, economic development, and
preservation of historic resources. The community must also have
an established downtown organization devoted to managing the
revitalization effort - from setting work priorities to organizing
volunteers and raising the funds necessary to support its work. As
a designated downtown, Vergennes is now eligible to apply for a
variety of programs to assist revitalization projects, including
over $4 million in state funds for transportation improvements,
public infrastructure, and the rehabilitation of older and
historic buildings.
FEATURE COMMENTARY:
When a giant retailer moves on, it leaves its 'big box' behind
Stacy Mitchell Monday, January 8, 2001
Most people are familiar with the damage Wal-Mart, Target and
other "big box" retailers have done to local economies.
Across the country, these giant stores have gutted downtowns and
decimated locally owned businesses.
Now the national chains are dealing communities a second blow.
They are vacating their existing stores, sometimes to build bigger
outlets, sometimes just closing up shop, in both cases leaving
huge empty shells and acres of asphalt behind.
Southern states, where big box retailers expanded early and
multiplied rapidly, have been hardest hit. But the problem is
beginning to surface in Minnesota. Wal-Mart intends to close
stores in Owatonna and Albert Lea later this year and open larger
outlets nearby. The 80,000-square-foot Albert Lea store is just 11
years old.
What can a city do with the shell of an old Wal-Mart store? Not
much. It's a problem plaguing planners and local officials, who
are struggling to contain the spread of this new retail blight.
It's also a warning to communities considering new big box
developments.
The roots of the retail vacancy problem are twofold. Chain
stores are multiplying at a staggering pace. They've created a
glut of retail space. In the last 12 years, per capita retail
space has increased 34 percent, from 15 to 20 square feet. Many
towns now have more retail space than residents can support.
The second part of the problem is that corporate chains
reinvent themselves every 10 years or so, abandoning existing
outlets in favor of new formats. First there were the strip malls,
which gave way to the enclosed malls. These in turn failed as
developers built ever-larger regional malls. Hundreds of malls
weakened and died following the arrival of the first big box
stores in the 1980s.
Then in the 1990s the big boxes themselves began to shed their
skins, vacating existing stores only to build larger outlets
across the street or across town.
Wal-Mart is one of the worst offenders. According to
Sprawl-Busters, an organization that helps communities fight
superstore sprawl, the United States is home to 380 empty Wal-Mart
stores. Wal-Mart plans to "relocate" up to 110 more
stores in the next year.
Most abandoned stores remain vacant for many years. An
abandoned Wal-Mart in Bards town, Ky., sat empty for nearly a
decade. Some cities are burdened with more than one empty box.
West Columbia, S.C., is home to almost a dozen empty or soon to be
vacated big box stores, including Wal-Mart, Target and Circuit
City.
Leapfrogging across the landscape costs these companies less
than recycling existing properties. But it's cheap only because
the rest of us are paying the price. The new stores are chewing up
valuable farmland and open space, exacerbating traffic and air
pollution, burdening public services and morphing our communities
into placeless blobs of sprawl.
A growing number of cities and towns are taking a different
approach. Many have barred the construction of new big box stores
and prohibited retail expansion into undeveloped areas. Tax
dollars are no longer spent on building roads and sewers to
service sprawling developments, but instead on strengthening Main
Street.
It's a strategy that pays off. Main Streets have been around
for hundreds of years. Individual businesses may come and go --
yesterday's dry goods store becomes today's Internet cafe -- but
the district itself retains its utility, serving as the center of
both economic and social life.
Most important, Main Street businesses, unlike global
companies, are owned by people who live in the community and are
committed to its well-being.
-- Stacy Mitchell is a researcher with the New Rules Project (http://www.newrules.org
) of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. She is the author of The
Home Town Advantage: How to Defend Your Main Street Against Chain
Stores and Why It Matters (ILSR, 2000) and edits a bimonthly
email newsletter (http://www.newrules.org/hta/index.htm
) on efforts nationwide to keep chain stores out and protect
locally owned businesses.
, a graduate of
Cornell’s Master’s program in historic preservation, is the
new field representative for Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont.
She succeeds Jeffrey Harris, who joined the Portland, ME planning
department as preservation compliance coordinator.
Up on Downtowns
Preservationist Paul Bruhn has no “edifice complex.’
He loves historic buildings, all right, but mostly he wants to
enhance communities. By Mark Bushnell for the Vermont Sunday
Magazine of the Sunday Rutland Herald and the Sunday Times Argus,
March 18, 2001. http://rutlandherald.nybor.com/To_Print/22454.html
OPPORTUNITIES
Station Foundation Announces 2001 Grant Program
The Great American Station Foundation is accepting
applications for its 2001cycle of grants for train station
revitalization projects until 4/13. The grants are intended to
help jump-start a community's effort to restore its rail station
as an active inter-modal transportation facility and ensure that
it contributes to community economic development. For more
details, visit http://www.stationfoundation.org.
HISTORIC DAM SURVEYOR: Summer Job in Vermont
The State of Vermont is undertaking an interdisciplinary
inventory and evaluation of dams in a collaborative project
between the Agency of Natural Resources and the State Historic
Preservation Office. The Water Quality Division seeks a motivated
and enthusiastic professional to work as the architectural
historian/industrial archeologist in a two-person team conducting
an assessment of all known dams in 3 watersheds (Lamoille, White,
Mettawee, and Poultney rivers), including the physical
characteristics and condition of the dam, its history,
characteristics of the river reaches and riparian zones above and
below the dam, and the historic context of the site. Interested
individuals should contact Brian T. Fitzgerald, Water Quality
Division, Agency of Natural Resources, 103 South Main Street,
Waterbury, VT 05671-0408, 802.241.3468, e-mail mailto:briantf@dec.anr.state.vt.us for
additional application information.
NATIONAL NEWS
Historic Preservation Fund
The federal historic preservation program offers a balanced
partnership that includes the National Park Service and the
Advisory Council on Historic Preservation. Funds through the
Historic Preservation Fund (HPF) support the States and Tribes and
special grants programs. Since its creation in 1976, Congress has
historically provided only a quarter, sometimes a third, of the
$150 million amount authorized under the HPF. Preservation Action
and the National Conference of State Historic Preservation
Officers have made full funding from the Historic Preservation
Fund a priority legislative objective.
During his February address to the nation, President Bush
delivered his "Blueprint for New Beginnings" to
Congress. Though details of the fiscal 2002 budget are not
finalized the blueprint indicates a drastic $57 million reduction
of the Historic Preservation Fund(HPF). It would zero out funding
for the Millennium Initiative to Save America’s Treasures and
end grants to Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU’s).
The HBCU cuts were expected, as the program has reached its total
authorized spending limit. It also appears that the Bush budget
reduces States and Tribal programs by $15 million. This reduction
may reflect the elimination of the increase secured as part of
Title VIII of fiscal 2001 Interior Appropriation bill.
For more information on the status of the Historic Preservation
Fund and what you can do, check out Preservation Actions Web Site:
http://www.preservationaction.org/approps_issue_paper2001.htm
