New life for old buildings

0 Comments | Deseret News (Salt Lake City), Apr 23, 2007 | by Susan Whitney Deseret Morning News

Before Madison Briggs ever saw the townhouse, she knew it was in a building that was more than 100 years old. If she ended up renting the place, she figured, her traditional furniture would look just fine.

Briggs is an artist and believes that every space has its own personality. The words "National Historic Register" conjured an image of how the townhouse might present itself.

But then she went inside the Artspace City Center, at 230 S. 500 West. Walking through the door, she did not find herself thinking, "the original ZCMI warehouse" or "welcome to the dry goods depot of yesteryear."

Instead, standing in the space that would become her home, her painting studio and her gallery, Briggs found herself thinking, "urban contemporary." As in vibrant. The word "streamlined" also came to mind.

She eventually got rid of most of her old furniture in favor of chrome and glass. She accented her rooms with bright colors including tangerine orange, apple green and teal blue. Every month on Gallery Stroll night, hundreds of people troop through her three- story home. They look at her paintings -- and also at the decor. One woman scrawled a note on a napkin and left it for Briggs to find: "Just want you to know, you are living my dream."

Briggs' home/gallery will be one of the stops this year on the Utah Heritage Foundation's annual historic tour. The title of the tour is "Downtown Reborn." It features seven buildings in the Gateway/Warehouse District of Salt Lake City, seven buildings that have been restored and adapted to house modern businesses or residences.

This year the Heritage celebration is much expanded. The tour will be part of a larger conference, a three-day event that features speeches and an awards dinner as well as a series of classes to be held on Friday at Fort Douglas.

Speakers include Paul Goldberger, "Sky Line" columnist for The New Yorker magazine; Barbara Handy Pahl, a regional director with the National Trust for Historic Preservation; and David Harris Hart, director of the Utah State Capitol Preservation Board. The classes include workshops for homeowners, updates on advocacy, as well as discussions on sustainability, Main Street rehab, and funding and tax credits.

The theme of the Utah Preservation Conference is "Preservation Builds Communities." The basic cost for the entire conference is $150, with individual classes for as little as $10 each. The tour alone is $20. (Discounts for Utah Heritage Foundation members. Call 533-0858 for details.)

Foundation director Stephen Thompson says board members encouraged the Utah Heritage Foundation to hold a conference, with classes, to help educate the public. He thinks the classes on making your home or small business more energy-efficient are especially important.

In featuring the Gateway neighborhood of Salt Lake, the Heritage Foundation tour guides will ask visitors to envision the neighborhood as it was in 1870, when the first railroad trains came through town. That's when the west side began to transform itself -- adding warehouses and hotels.

The Gillies, Stranksy, Brehms, Smith Architects office, at 375 W. 200 South, is also a stop on the tour. Stephen B. Smith, one of the building's owners and a partner in GSBS, says the building began life in 1898, as Wilber Henderson's wholesale grocery. Three of the five buildings on the block, including the Henderson grocery, were designed by one of the state's premiere architects, Walter Ware, who practiced in Salt Lake for 60 years.

Ware designed many other buildings, too, including First Presbyterian Church (among other Presbyterian churches around the state) and Westminster College's Converse Hall. The sandstone Henderson building is unusually attractive for a warehouse, with its Roman arches, tin cornices and other details. It cost $20,000 to build.

Smith likes to trace its history, talking about how in 1932 the Henderson family leased the building to the state to be used for a liquor warehouse and how Clark Leaming, owner of a furniture store, bought the warehouse in 1977 and began to rehabilitate it.

Smith served on the Heritage Foundation board at that time and knows how nicely the Leamings restored the building. "We gave it an award," Smith recalls. He thought at the time, "This is a way cool building." About 15 years later, when it came up for sale, Smith would have loved to have bought it. However, in the early '90s his firm had only 25 employees and the space was too big and too expensive for their needs.

So the Henderson building became a restaurant and brewery, and Smith credits the owners of Fuggles for keeping it up quite well. By the time the building came on the market again, in1998, GSBS Architects had grown.

Today 70 employees work there. Most sit at desks arranged within a central square, a space lit by skylights and set a few feet lower than the surrounding floor. The architects work in what was once the bay next to the docks, where, after a remodel in 1931, trucks could pull in.

"This building is a great example of sustainability," Smith says. "Over 100 years old, still beautiful, adapted to a variety of uses." Working here, he says he feels the latent energy of its history. He loves sitting under the huge windows, his desk eight feet from the sidewalk, feeling close to everything that happens on the street outside.