School Houses Rock
Not long ago I did a blog about the myriad examples of preserved, adapted historic gas stations. Today let’s look at schools. I remember schools rehabbed into homes from the beginning of my career over 34 years ago.
The Lemont School – front half 1896, rear piece 1869 – converted into residences c. 1980.
The Lemont School above shows how even two generations of school design are easily adapted, since they needed large windows to allow enough light in for instruction – a feature suited well to conversion into apartments or condos. Offices are another easy rehabilitation goal, as seen in this 1874 school in Georgetown, Colorado. (This is from a decade ago – it is rehabbed now)
Schools are a more straightforward rehab prospect than other community-defining buildings like churches and theaters, which tend to have a massive open space inside, although of course more modern schools will themselves include assembly halls and theaters, along with gymnasia. Still, most classrooms are easily made into offices, condos or even retail spaces.
This one is for the birds. I mean The Birds (Bodega Bay, California).
Which brings us to this lovely 1916 school by local architect Leo Dielmann, which was “saved,” or rather “not demolished” 20 years ago when they tore off various additions and built a new school. And then let this one rot. Despite a sturdy concrete frame, the roof was the only wood portion and it turned into a sponge in the last decade. But the walls are there and it is beautiful.
Still the owners – the School District – have pulled a fast one, or more accurately, a really SLOW one. Demolition by neglect. Over more than two decades. Makes it look almost…natural.
Councilman Treviño has been fighting for the school, and our friends over at Ford Powell Carson architects even did some renderings to show how it could be rehabbed.
Many neighbors want to save it, but others have been convinced by the long con that the eyesore is too far gone and must be removed. The real crime here is that no one gets dunned for demolition by neglect – the most common way to deliberately destroy a perfectly usable building. There is also lack of vision – seeing older buildings as obstacles rather than opportunities.
See?
Treviño is fighting a Principal and Superintendent who want to see the building go away, which was perhaps the plan 20-odd years ago. That would be a shame. For the neighborhood, the city, and future resources subjected to the mistreatment of the long con.
My favorite BugaBoo
My favorite bugaboo about heritage conservation rose its head this Easter/April Fool’s morning in the form of an editorial in the Rivard Report. The bugaboo goes like this, and has for over a century: If we focus too much on saving the past we won’t have a future or any new development.
Like Paris…
Ed Glaeser made this argument regarding Manhattan in his book Triumph of the City earlier in the decade. I loved the book, which had a myriad of brilliant insights and then this bugaboo which was so simplistic it required no response. Manhattan has been saving TONS of its building inventory for three generations with no ill effect to its vibrancy or economy. Just visit Times Square.
Prisoner of the past abandoned by development
No United States city has designated as landmarks more than about 3 or 4 percent of its buildings. So the argument basically is that development is such a precarious and precious business that it can’t survive on a free-fire zone that covers 96 percent of the landscape. Really?
San Antonio from the Tower of the Americas, 2014.
The really fascinating thing about this statistic is that it hasn’t changed in 30 years. Yes, more sites and districts get designated as historic (and keep developing, BTW) but plenty more new stuff gets added. The whole reason Glaeser went after Manhattan is that the statistic there is much higher, although when you include all five boroughs it is back to normal.
That’s the Triborough Bridge
So here is the bugaboo in its unadulterated form from today’s : “it could reach a tipping point where just about anything and everything is accorded historic status. In a world where everything is historic, nothing is historic.”
So where is that? Where did that happen? And if it didn’t happen anywhere, why is it a valid argument? Where is it ABOUT to happen?
Chicago designated ONE MILE of downtown building frontage 15 years ago. Contrary to our favorite bugaboo, this has actually inspired development (including a supertall on a vacant lot) and investment. Once San Antonio covers the 40% of its downtown that is currently surface parking, we might begin to worry about a slippery slope.
View from King William (designated 1967) to Tower of the Americas.
Now, to be fair to my friend Bob Rivard, the impetus for the piece was the proposed viewshed ordinance, inspired by the development near the Hays Street Bridge, to protect iconic views. This would seem to potentially thwart projects that aren’t designated. Interestingly, Austin – not a town known for preservation – has one of the most complicated viewshed protections in place for the Capitol.
The reality is that any protection system functions not as a prohibition but as a site of negotiation. This already happens with the Historic and Design Review Commission, which considered viewsheds of the Tower Life Building in reviewing a new development at St. Mary’s and Cesar Chavez. Good planning is buttressed by landmark laws and viewshed laws, not because they prohibit, but because they provide a review platform that integrates development into the urban fabric.
Disclosure: I serve on the Viewshed Technical Advisory Panel, so I am well acquainted with the specifics of how viewshed ordinances work. This information, like all knowledge, dispels fear, especially of this bugaboo.
Gas Station – Why Demolish an Opportunity?
This is Bliss, a restaurant in San Antonio. The upscale American cuisine focuses on fresh ingredients, has superior service and is consistently ranked one of the best restaurants in the nation’s seventh largest city. It is housed in a historic Humble Oil gas station.
This is the Station Cafe, across from our office, a more modest sandwich shop that is filled to the brink every lunchtime and offers evening beers from its historic Texaco gas station.
At Austin Highway and Broadway this former Mobil gas station is an upscale women’s boutique described as a “must-visit for anyone who is in the mood to indulge in some retail therapy.” sloan/hall is high-end adaptive re-use.
This is another historic gas station on St. Mary’s Street just north of downtown that is about to be converted into a restaurant.
I could go on with many more examples, but the bottom line is that historic gas stations are adaptive re-use GOLD. Like everything in the entirely externalized world of real estate value, location is key, which brings us to the city’s newest trail, along San Pedro and Apache Creeks. I have ridden it a half-dozen times already.
The trail was just completed in the last year and connects to the famous Mission Reach trail that runs 12 miles through the World Heritage area.
Pictured above is a trailhead near Nogalitos Street. Which brings us to this 1936 Pure Oil gas station at this very trailhead.
2017 photo.
Pure Oil was a San Antonio company that adopted the half-timbered Tudor Revival for their stations, which can be found in a dozen states. This is the only one left in San Antonio. It features steeply pitched roofs on both the “house” and “canopy”.
The same station in 2012, detail of the half-timbering on the canopy.
And here it is in 1983 when the San Antonio Conservation Society surveyed it. We surveyed more than 1,500 gas stations over the years, and this was one of the 30 best, proposed as city landmarks last year. Having looked at 1500 stations, we can tell you with confidence that the Tudor Style is quite unusual and the station is quite intact.
2012 polychrome view
But then the station was quietly pulled from the designation list at the behest of the out-of-town owner. So the San Antonio Conservation Society filed a Request for Review of Significance, which the Historic and Design Review Commission agreed to.
We also learned at that time that the site was quite large and the little gem of a gas station only occupies about one-eighth of the land. The Office of Historic Preservation ruled that ONLY the gas station had historic significance, so the other buildings on site do not need to be re-used.
An acre of land along the trail and a cell phone tower to boot!
A map showing construction of the site. Only Area 1 is proposed landmark.
The owner hired the best real estate attorneys to prevent designation. Why? Because it would be worth more demolished? That argument doesn’t hold up too well in this town – gas stations are constantly turned into successful businesses. Here’s a few more:
The Conservation Society met with attorneys for the owners and Councilwoman Gonzales moments before the item came up at City Council. All parties agreed to put designation on hold for 60 days.
Re-use the gas station on the right (corner of Nogalitos and Ralph). SPLACH is optional, as are the other buildings.
A restored Pure Oil station in McMinnville, TN in case you wanted to see an example. One also became a BANK in Geneva, Illinois.
We are trying to find the right buyer for all or part of the site before the DEADLINE of March 18. For more information, contact me at vmichael@saconservation.org,
Now for a few more of the successfully rehabbed gas stations in San Antonio:
APRIL 2018 UPDATE
The gas station got another reprieve, this time for six months, although it is still not officially for sale. If interested in this, please contact me!
Kids These Days: Real Estate 2018
I always enjoy the Urban Land Institute’s analysis of Emerging Real Estate Trends (by pwc) and this year was no exception. What made it especially interesting was the demographic foundation of much of the analysis: the Millennial/Generation Z groups that will define the future of space. As usual, the punks have it all over the hippies.
1. SMALL
The next generation is not interested in your 6,000 square foot McMansion or even your 3,200 square foot suburban gem. I recall Doug Farr about seven years ago describing a potential tenant for a retrofitted Lathrop Homes unit: Has a $5,000 bicycle and an iPad. Probably only wants 700 square feet. Will not be collecting furniture.
Let them eat cupcakes.
They are here and they are happy with small space. People collect information and experiences now, and while vinyl and books and even mid-century modern furniture are all hipster now, most of what we collect fits on a device smaller than your thumb.
There will be a lot of obsolete McMansions soon.
2. NO AUTO MOTIVE
All the talk of driverless cars plays right into the next generation. They are getting their driving licenses later or not at all. They Uber everywhere. The autonomous vehicle already exists for them as a choice consumer product. The countryside the hippies wanted to escape to in the 1970s became the suburbia these kids grew up in in the 1990s. There is nowhere to drive to anymore. The car no longer symbolizes freedom.
As it turns out there are more comfortable places to have sex. Who knew?
For real estate, the more radical transformation is not the autonomous car but the autonomous truck. Self-driving trucks will have a much bigger impact on the real estate landscape than cars. This was also true with the advent of the truck and car a century ago. That’s why we have zoning.
Soon all traffic will be stage managed.
The evolution of the internet of things has also meant that technology is now shifting away from the cloud and onto the edge – where cars and trucks and houses have enough computing power to learn and manage data. I read in the Economist that one theory about why Amazon bought Whole Foods was to have enough physical footprint to implement edge computing nationwide.
And Canada, I assume
3. PRIVATE COLLABORATION
Back to those Millennials/Generation Z. About five years ago I toured Bloomberg headquarters in New York City and it was the ultimate open office. Fish tanks and food kiosks everywhere, ridiculously bright colors, and desks sprawled across an open floor plan. The CEO occupied just another desk. No corner offices. Open space encourages collaboration, so offices followed the open plan. Hippie Paradise.
Architects love this stuff..(Wikimedia Commons Miller Thomson Vancouver)
Millennials LOVE to collaborate. They collaborate more than any other generation ever.
By smart phone. Alone. Behind a closed door. ULI explained that the old office door is making a big comeback. The Millennials and Generation Z demand amenities like rooftop gardens, food options and gyms, but they also really, really want to be able to close the door.
Turns out the physical and mental world aren’t perfect analogues. Who knew?
According to ULI “Over half (of employees) reported that ambient noise reduces their satisfaction at work.” The open space plan is still there, but the pushback is growing. Coworking spaces, which are like multiplayer live-work lofts, are also a thing now – one such company in New York now leases more space than Goldman Sachs.
4. RETAIL IN THE AMAZON AGE
The death of retail is painfully obvious in America, because even though online retailing has ONLY taken 10% of the market, the U.S. retail market was grossly overbuilt, with 10 times the capacity per capita of Germany. So it is REALLY visible and we will have plenty of malls to go with those McMansions in the 2030 fire sale.
Ahh…fulfillment
Perhaps some will be converted into fulfillment centers, where massive physical space is needed to keep the online retail world humming as they send and receive and repair in million-square-foot tilt-up panel behemoths. Buildings are getting bigger and smaller at the same time.
5. OLD FOR NEW
What does all this mean for historic buildings? My own Millennial offspring seem to love the Jane Jacobs idea that new ideas need old buildings. They have doors. They have character and patina and a story or two. They are often smaller. They are greener than new buildings because they are already there, and as the last 70 years have shown us, they are endlessly adaptable.
Frank Lloyd Wright Demolished
Last summer I was visiting my daughter in Kalispell, Montana, a lovely historic town. One day we toured nearby Whitefish, which has a small history museum but was quite the contrast, as I mentioned in a blog HERE. The one highlight was our discovery of a late Frank Lloyd Wright building, even labeled as such – completed as a medical office in 1961.
I am on the Board of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy and at the time I remembered the controversy and concern for the building. Modest, it still echoed the Marin County complex in its rolling sculpted eave and horizontal emphasis.
But this week it looks like this
Why? The pat answer is greed, but the real answer is hidden behind a seeming expression of greed: $1.7 million. The blatantly unreasonable request almost sounds like “$1.7 million or I kill the building!” And he followed through, which may have been the intention all along. The piles of rubble remind me of the 1972 piles of the old Chicago Stock Exchange, which was similarly flipped up until it had a price it could not sustain, because real estate is the only asset class whose value is fully externalized.
It is usually a con. Those silly preservationists think it is valuable, so I will ask them for too much money and then blame them when I demolish it. Which is exactly, in every aspect, how a kidnapping for ransom works.
This was the trade Chicago made in 1972 after the Adler & Sullivan Chicago Stock Exchange was flipped by promoters to an unsustainable value. To be replaced by a physical absence, a building that you can’t even look at for more than a second if you try.
So, that is the greed angle and the ransom angle, but what about The Vacant Lot Myth: that a cleared site is worth more for an owner? I covered this a couple years back HERE. It is like The Beige – what realtors tell you to paint your walls to appeal to the widest possible audience. Not the best audience, not the best price, but the largest potential market. Which leads to absences.
Sadly, the absence in Whitefish builds on a local legacy of absence. There is a plaque where they tore down their oldest building about five years ago. Tourists may still come through on their way to Glacier Park but they will have less reason to linger, less to see, and less to remember.
Buildings For The Future
My favorite quote from Donovan Rypkema during our Living Heritage Symposium last month was a marvelously simple recitation about why saving old buildings is economically brilliant. He said simply: “You can’t build new and rent cheap.”
Passive Aggressive
Passive Aggressive behavior is a terrible character failing. It is a sign of immaturity or stunted development. I know something of this and work to avoid it.
The Value of Heritage
When a lover of history, architecture, or neighborhoods sees an historic building or district, they value it. They want to save it, to preserve that value. Continue Reading
Real Estate 2017
I attended a recent ULI event here in San Antonio that outlined emerging trends in real estate. I was struck by how much the factors they identified tracked with my own prognostications in November during my Partners speech in Houston at the National Trust conference.
Concrete Culture and the One-Trick Pony
Everyone in every borough goes to the Met, right?
I was going to write a blog about the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, now that I have been on hand to witness its demise on two waterfronts, one saltwater, one freshwater. I spoke to fierce advocates, including a friend who was on the committee that selected the Chicago site south of Soldier Field. I wondered why advocates had not developed a clear vision of what the museum was supposed to be, and I wondered whether lakefront museums designed for international tourists ever really serve the local population. Continue Reading